oclif VS enquirer

oclif is a library that helps create CLI applications using Node.js. If you are using a different programming language, search for a suitable library.

It is possible, oclif is a full featured framework produced by Salesforce and is used for the Salesforce and Heroku CLI applications. I have used oclif and pkg to bundle a standalone, though I was focused on MacOS not Windows. Any node application should work with pkg, though.

oClif.io

Check out https://oclif.io/

Interesting. TIL about the Open CLI framework that they all seem to be moving to: https://oclif.io/

https://oclif.io is a tool that helps you build command line tools with node. You can use it to help you create an executable for Linux, max, or windows that you can invoke from the command line.

Oclif to quickly click together CLI tools for kicking off and monitoring crawls, generating reports, etc.

During the second Ably Innovation Days, I started working on specifications for an Ably CLI. After the first day Phil and I started with a prototype based on oclif. We managed to create a working prototype in a day that lists Ably apps, and creates a new Ably app. This project is still Work In Progress. Once the CLI is in a releasable state, I'll create some content around this.

A command-line interface, often referred to as a CLI, is a program that allows users to type instructions and interact with a script that processes the input and produces an output. Node.js has a lot of packages that allows you to build CLIs, like args, minimist, and oclif.

Although I'm happy there is a way to bundle Node.js apps with support for pnpm, and for a modern-ish version of Node.js, it's somewhat slow in my experience to build locally. Interactivity doesn't have the greatest ecosystem there, especially with TypeScript. Best library I've found is Enquirer.

{ "name": "@jonschlinkert/omit-deep", "description": "Recursively omit specified keys from an object", "tags": ["object", "deep", "remove", "omit"], "version": "0.3.0", "author": "Jon Schlinkert (https://github.com/jonschlinkert)", "repository": "jonschlinkert/omit-deep", "bugs": "https://github.com/jonschlinkert/omit-deep/issues", "license": "MIT" }

In case you need to ask for user input, optionally you can use a prompt file. This is very useful to customize the output of the generator. Prompts are defined using a library named Enquirer.

> I don't fully understand why packages like this are so popular.

It actually works like this: Author X develops `iseven`, `isodd`, etc. No one really downloads such packages. Author X then develops `importantPackage` which does do something useful developers out here download. Now `iseven`, `isodd` are downloaded alongside `importantPackage`.

My point is, we should recognize certain NPM authors as toxic, but I guess "freedom of speech/code" stops us from doing so. Example of such an author: https://github.com/jonschlinkert/

something like enquirer

You're thinking of Jon Schlinkert, publisher of 1435 packages on npm.

It's insanely funny to me that these packages exist while one of his bigger projects (https://github.com/enquirer/enquirer) lists the following reason under "why use it":

> Lightweight - Only one dependency, the excellent ansi-colors by Brian Woodward.

It's written by this guy, who shits out micro libraries by the hundreds. He moved the project to another user under the pretense that he was learning to program back then, but a lot of his stuff is similarly inconsequential micro libraries.

Enquirer