CLI v0.1

Skeleton a basic CLI app in packages/flowershow and publish to npm

I want to run npx flowershow and get a help message

Acceptance

• Can run flowershow or npx flowershow and it outputs a simple help message ✅ 2022-09-07 works
• published to npm ✅ 2022-09-07 published
• Test (?) - normally best approach is to split into a core lib and cli wrapper and you can test core lib I think I’ll add tests while working on the actual logic for the commands

Tasks

• Research
  • Choose command line library (with reasons)
  • Examine other good open source command line tools in node (e.g. vercel, even old https://github.com/datopian/data-cli)
• Skeleton it out and have help message
• Publish

Notes

Most popular tools for creating CLI tools seem to be:

1. commander (alternatives: yargs, minimist, oclif, argh, and others)

• tool for defining commands, parsing arguments, displaying errors, and help

  Commander looks after parsing the arguments into options and command-arguments, displays usage errors for problems, and implements a help system.

1. inquirer

• for inquiry sessions, possibly with fancy menus (e.g. like vue-cli)

provides the user interface and the inquiry session flow providing error feedback, asking questions, parsing input, validating answers, managing hierarchical prompts

1. chalk

• for cool terminal string styling

1. winston

For consistent formatting of log output and ease of applying things like prefixes

commander vs yargs vs minimist vs oclif

• it’s rather a matter of preference…
• minimist is very…minimal - it only helps with arguments parsing (I’d rather choose sth more convenient/easier to use e.g. commander)
• commander has no dependencies
• vue-cli and datopian-cli are using minimist+inquirer+chalk

[rufuspollock]

@olayway good work

1. Ans: the tool should go into the existing https://github.com/flowershow/flowershow/tree/main/packages/flowershow (it is already what is publishing to flowershow on npm)
2. Ans: no we publish to flowershow package for now so people can do npx flowershow ...

[rufuspollock]

@olayway great - let’s close. 👏