shelljs VS deno

Compare shelljs vs deno and see what are their differences.

shelljs

:shell: Portable Unix shell commands for Node.js (by shelljs)

deno

A modern runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript. (by denoland)
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shelljs deno
27 446
14,117 92,681
0.3% 0.7%
6.4 9.9
about 1 month ago about 23 hours ago
JavaScript Rust
BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License MIT 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

  • 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

  • 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...

  • Fixing a bug in an open source project - telescope
    2 projects | dev.to | 31 Oct 2021
    Having never worked with shelljs, I spent a little bit going through their documentation and found out that exec() accepted 3 arguments for the callback, namely code, stdout and stderr. Gaining that little bit of knowledge, I went back into the file to gain an idea of what was going on.
  • Can we please share Hero Grids and Filters?
    8 projects | /r/DotA2 | 20 Aug 2021
    i'm using visual studio code as the code editor and right now the vrf cli (using a shelljs wrapper) to decompile/export game files and assets like hero images or icons.

deno

Posts with mentions or reviews of deno. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-05.
  • 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
  • Unison Cloud
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Feb 2024
    So as an end user it's kind of like https://deno.com/ where you buy into a runtime + comes prepacked with DBs (k/v stores), scheduling, and deploy stuff?

    > by storing Unison code in a database, keyed by the hash of that code, we gain a perfect incremental compilation cache which is shared among all developers of a project. This is an absolutely WILD feature, but it's fantastic and hard to go back once you've experienced it. I am basically never waiting around for my code to compile - once code has been parsed and typechecked once, by anyone, it's not touched again until it's changed.

    Interesting. Whats it like upgrading and managing dependencies in that code? I'd assume it gets more complex when it's not just the Union system but 3rd party plugins (stuff interacting with the OS or other libs).

  • Deno in 2023
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Feb 2024
    ~90MB+ at this stage and do now allow compression without erroring out. Deploying ala Golang is not feasible at that level but could well be down the line if this dev branch is picked up again!

    The exe output grew from from ~50MB to plus ~90MB from 2021 to 2024: https://github.com/denoland/deno/discussions/9811 which mean Deno is worse than Node.js's pkg solution by a decent margin.

  • Mini site for recommending songs using Svelte & Deno
    2 projects | dev.to | 3 Feb 2024
    Behind the scenes is a simple Sveltekit-powered server function to fetch a Spotify client token then find a user's recommendation playlist and its track information. A Deno edge function to performs this data fetch and renders server-side Svelte.
  • Supercharge your app with user extensions using Deno JavaScript runtime
    4 projects | dev.to | 24 Jan 2024
    If your application is written in JavaScript, integrating it with JavaScript extensions is a no-brainer. However, Secutils.dev is entirely written in Rust. How would I even begin? Fortunately, I recently came across an excellent blog post series explaining how to implement your JavaScript runtime in a Rust application with Deno:
    4 projects | dev.to | 24 Jan 2024
    Protecting against memory-hungry scripts in Deno is more challenging. I won't go into details about how it works and instead direct you to the issue in the Deno repository with all the details. In short, you need to create a JavaScript runtime with a specific heap limit and add a callback that's invoked when the memory limits are approached. This gives you a chance to terminate the execution before Deno/V8 crashes the entire process.
  • Oxlint – written in Rust – 50-100 Times Faster than ESLint
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Dec 2023
  • Deno Cron
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Nov 2023
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Nov 2023
    Thank you for the detailed feedback. Deno 1.38.4 was just released with a partial fix for the VSCode issue you mentioned. We're fixing the twisted issue too.

    https://github.com/denoland/deno/issues/21389

    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Nov 2023
    This is being worked on: https://github.com/denoland/deno/issues/21122. Should be available with the next Deno release.

What are some alternatives?

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

ASP.NET Core - ASP.NET Core is a cross-platform .NET framework for building modern cloud-based web applications on Windows, Mac, or Linux.

typescript-language-server - TypeScript & JavaScript Language Server

zx - A tool for writing better scripts

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

pnpm - Fast, disk space efficient package manager

esbuild - An extremely fast bundler for the web

bun - Incredibly fast JavaScript runtime, bundler, test runner, and package manager – all in one

cross-env

Koa - Expressive middleware for node.js using ES2017 async functions

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

chalk - 🖍 Terminal string styling done right

warp-reverse-proxy - Fully composable warp filter that can be used as a reverse proxy.