oclif VS pkg

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.

Now, to call the scripts I've made I use oclif to easily include it in a cronjob.

If we look at what this package is based on, we will see that we are using oclif - this is a node.js-based tool for creating a CLI.

I’d recommend using OCLIF (https://oclif.io/). It makes building super fancy CLIs a breeze

I don't remember the details, and cannot find my notes on vercel/pkg. But looking at https://github.com/vercel/pkg right now I see the project has been deprecated in favour of single-executable-applications

> Standalone CLI — we haven’t worked on a standalone CLI for the new engine yet, but will absolutely have it before the v4.0 release.

This part is the most exciting to me. Given the rest of the release announcement, I'm assuming this means that it'll be built in Rust rather than embed Node. While I'm not a Rust zealot of anything, I'm very partial to not embedding Node. Particularly when it depends on using Vercel's now-abandoned pkg[1] tool.`

[1] https://github.com/vercel/pkg

The npm package called "pkg" seems to be the standard for packaging NodeJS applications

https://www.npmjs.com/package/pkg

Unfortunately you also need to bundle all your code into a single file for it to work, but you can use any bundler (webpack, parcel, etc) you want at least

Nodejs support for "single executable applications" is getting there - this issue below is preventing wider adoption at the moment:

"The single executable application feature currently only supports running a single embedded script using the CommonJS module system."

https://nodejs.org/api/single-executable-applications.html

Should be an awesome game changer for node.js when the feature gets rounded out.

Also check out vercel's `pkg`: https://github.com/vercel/pkg/issues/1291

Yes, you can. Check out pkg for a fun option, which can package up your project and Node.js into a single executable.

package the app using https://github.com/vercel/pkg and use a smaller base image like alpine, busybox or even scratch (if possible)

pkg is a tool that bundles up either JS source code or V8 bytecode, along with NodeJS in a binary file and a virtual filesystem, and produces an executable binary file.