shelljs VS bun

Compare shelljs vs bun and see what are their differences.

bun

Incredibly fast JavaScript runtime, bundler, test runner, and package manager – all in one (by oven-sh)
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shelljs bun
27 288
14,139 70,488
0.3% 2.9%
6.4 10.0
2 months ago 5 days ago
JavaScript Zig
BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License -
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

shelljs

Posts with mentions or reviews of shelljs. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-20.
  • The Bun Shell
    17 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Jan 2024
    When I need shell-like utilities from my JS scripts I've previously used shelljs [0]. It's neat that Bun is adding more built-in utilities though.

    [0] https://github.com/shelljs/shelljs

  • Auto commit with LaunchAgents & JavaScript
    1 project | dev.to | 2 Feb 2023
    Now we can open this new project and we're going to install one package, shelljs Shelljs is a great Command Line Utility for interacting with the command line in JavaScript.
  • zx 7.0.0 release
    2 projects | /r/javascript | 14 Jun 2022
    Feels like this library is trying to solve a problem solved long ago by shelljs
  • Guide: Hush Shell-Scripting Language
    23 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Apr 2022
    The purpose of OP's project kind of reminded me of shell.js (shx) [1] which is a nodejs library that wraps all kinds of common UNIX commands to their own synchronously executed methods.

    I guess that most shell projects start off as wanting to be a cross-platform solution to other operating systems, but somewhere in between either escalate to being their own programming language (like all the powershell revamps) or trying to reinvent the backwards-compatibility approach and/or POSIX standards (e.g. oil shell).

    What I miss among all these new shell projects is a common standardization effort like sh/dash/bash/etc did back in the days. Without creating something like POSIX that also works on Windows and MacOS, all these shell efforts remain being only toy projects of developers without the possibility that they could actually replace the native shells of Linux distributions.

    Most projects in the node.js area I've seen migrate their build scripts at some point to node.js, because maintaining packages and runtimes on Windows is a major shitshow. node.js has the benefit (compared to other environments) that it's a single .exe that you have to copy somewhere and then you're set to go.

    When I compare that with python, for example, it is super hard to integrate. All the anaconda- or python-based bundles for ML engineers are pretty messed up environments on Windows; and nobody actually knows where their site-packages/libraries are really coming from and how to even update them correctly with upstream.

    [1] https://github.com/shelljs/shelljs

  • Change working directory in my current shell context when running Node script
    1 project | /r/codehunter | 29 Mar 2022
    `` When I then run this file with./bin/nodefile`, it exits, but the working directory of the current shell context has not changed. I have also tried shelljs, but that does not work either.
  • Ask HN: Let's Build CheckStyle for Bash?
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Feb 2022
    Oh people have tried - here are a few https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10239235/are-there-any-l...

    I vaguely remember quite liking bish when I saw it years ago https://github.com/tdenniston/bish but it looks like no commits in 6 years.

    This shelljs thing looks more promising, but really tedious to use https://github.com/shelljs/shelljs - shell.rm('-rf', 'out/Release'); I'd rather suffer proper bash than have to do that sort of thing.

    Nothing seems to have really caught on so far. Bash is easy to learn and hack on, and before you know it, that simple install.sh that started out moving a few files around is 5000 lines, unmaintainable, and critical to bootstrapping your software :)

  • Release of google/zx 5.0.0
    2 projects | /r/javascript | 9 Feb 2022
    I personally prefer shelljs for stuff like this. zx seems pretty high on the "insane syntactic sugar" train.
  • How to build a CLI using NodeJS 💻
    10 projects | dev.to | 4 Jan 2022
    As we are creating starter files, let's use ShellJS to run commands like git clone, mkdir...
  • shelljs VS bargs - a user suggested alternative
    2 projects | 7 Dec 2021
  • Scripting Languages of the Future
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Nov 2021
    This talks a bunch about the "good run" of current scripting languages, including for example JavaScript.

    But JavaScript, as an actual scripting language, has been pretty primitive but finally starting to become a real candidate for actual scripting. There's imo crufty not very great options like shelljs[1]. But adding a tagged-template string for system(), for calling things, and a little bit of standard library has made JS a much more interesting & competent scripting language. Those efforts are being done in ZX[2].

    I like the idea of the topic, exploring it. But the author feels off in a number of places.

    > What TypeScript showed is that you could join together the idea of a flexible lightweight (and optional!) type system onto an existing programming language, and do so successfully. . . .The question then is - what if you created a programming language from the start to have this kind of support?

    Personally I just don't think languages matter very much. They're very similar, by & large. They have different tooling, packaging, somewhat different looks/feels for executing code, and their standard libraries are different. But TypeScript is popular & fast at least 90% because it is JS, because it works with JS things. Arguing that we should try to recreate TypeScript apart from JS sounds like a mind blowing waste of time. Also, Deno has good integrated TypeScript support.

    On the topic of easy parallelism, JavaScript promises are imo quite easy to stitch together & use & quite available.

    One of the main issues I see with easy-parallelism is that it's too easy: there's too many cases for uncontrolled parallelism. Throwing tarn.js or other worker-pools at problems seems all too common. But one is still left stitching together each pool/stage of work. I'd like to see SEDA[3] like architectures emerge, and perhaps get added to something like ZX standard library.

    [1] https://github.com/shelljs/shelljs

    [2] https://github.com/google/zx

    [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staged_event-driven_architectu...

bun

Posts with mentions or reviews of bun. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-25.
  • Node Test Runner vs Bun Test Runner (with TypeScript and ESM)
    1 project | dev.to | 26 Apr 2024
    It has a decent compatibility with both Jest and Vitest's APIs (you can track progress here so you can use it as almost a drop-in replacement for either. Just as Node's, it has describe/it, mock, test and others, but with the expect syntax (which I find more readable). For example:
  • SPA-Like Navigation Preserving Web Component State
    2 projects | dev.to | 25 Apr 2024
    In this third and final article in the series on HTML Streaming, we will explore the practical implementation of the Diff DOM Streaming library in web browsing. This approach will allow any website using web components to retain its state during browsing. We will discuss in detail how to achieve this step by step using VanillaJS and Bun.
  • React Server Components Example with Next.js
    9 projects | dev.to | 16 Apr 2024
    At Node Conference 2023, Jarred Sumner (creator of Bun) showed a demo of server components in Bun, so there is at least partial support in that ecosystem. The Bun repo provides bun-plugin-server-components as the official plugin for server components. And while I haven’t looked at it in-depth, Marz claims to be a “React Server Components Framework for Bun”.
  • Bun – A fast all-in-one JavaScript runtime
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Apr 2024
  • From Node to Bun: A New Dawn for JavaScript Engines?
    1 project | dev.to | 3 Apr 2024
    Continuously evolving, Bun is currently optimized for MacOS and Linux, with ongoing efforts towards Windows compatibility. Tailored for resource-constrained environments like serverless functions, it emerges as an ideal solution. The Bun team is committed to achieving comprehensive Node.js compatibility and seamless integration with prevalent frameworks. For those intrigued by Bun's potential and want to give it a try, more information is available on its website at https://bun.sh/.
  • Bun - The One Tool for All Your JavaScript/Typescript Project's Needs?
    4 projects | dev.to | 2 Apr 2024
    Let’s say you are interested in learning more about Bun and probably give it a try. Bun has a website, where you can learn more about Bun and its features (including all the benchmark data captured in this issue), and here is the link.
  • Bun 1.1
    17 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Apr 2024
    Looks like it, it seems the 2% are mostly odd platform specific issues that the authors' did not deem very important (my assumption for the release happening anyway). AFAIK this[1] PR tries to fix them.

    [1]: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/9729

  • Bun-ify Your Project
    1 project | dev.to | 6 Mar 2024
    Bun has a solution for it. First of all, it already has a list of trusted dependencies. For them, Bun will execute all necessary scripts by default. Otherwise, you can add it to trustedDependecies in your package.json file. In Bun community usage of trustedDependencies is a hot topic. There are several suggestions on how to improve it.
  • I have created a small anti-depression script
    4 projects | dev.to | 5 Mar 2024
    Install Node.js (or Bun, or Deno, or whatever JS runtime you prefer) if it's not there
  • JSR: The JavaScript Registry
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Mar 2024
    I think maybe I was unclear. I'm talking about writing libraries that abstract across these differences and provide a single API, as sibling describes. I already know it's possible. I made a simple filesystem abstraction here[0] and a very simple HTTP library that uses it here[1]. They both work in Node/Deno and the browser. Unfortunately I ran into issues with Bun's slice implementation[2]. But I suspect there's a much better way of detecting and using the different backends.

    [0]: https://github.com/waygate-io/fs-js

    [1]: https://github.com/waygate-io/http-js

    [2]: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues/7057

What are some alternatives?

When comparing shelljs and bun you can also consider the following projects:

zx - A tool for writing better scripts

vite - Next generation frontend tooling. It's fast!

Inquirer.js - A collection of common interactive command line user interfaces.

GORM - The fantastic ORM library for Golang, aims to be developer friendly

cross-env

nvm - Node Version Manager - POSIX-compliant bash script to manage multiple active node.js versions

fastify - Fast and low overhead web framework, for Node.js

chalk - 🖍 Terminal string styling done right

go-pg - Golang ORM with focus on PostgreSQL features and performance

sudo-block - Block users from running your app with root permissions

deno - A modern runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript.