RFC: Better DX for making CLI

Current Behavior

TSDX doesn’t really support building CLI’s well.

• The preserve-shebang plugin doesn’t actually work (#109) because we insert a CJS entry file that doesn’t know about it. Thus, you actually can’t create a CLI package without manually inserting #!/usr/bin/env node in front of ./dist/index.js. I recently did this in a lil postbuild script. Not bad, but also not great.
• Dev/prod doesn’t matter to CLI’s, neither does esm or umd.

Desired Behavior

Building CLI’s should be seamless and intuitive

Suggested Solution

• Make it possible to opt-out of dev/prod builds
• Explore https://github.com/vercel/ncc and how it inlines all dependencies into a single file. Evaluate whether we take its best ideas or just document how to integrate it as a recipe
• Create a CLI template
  • Explore Gluegun’s test setup

Who does this impact? Who is this for?

• Me, advanced users

Describe alternatives you’ve considered

Additional context

[ivan-aksamentov]

Make it possible to opt-out of dev/prod builds

Should be careful here. Many CLI projects would also ship a programmatic interface, that is the “classic” tsdx package + CLI, not just CLI.

For example, I want to ship bin/my-cli executable and lib/index.js module, and I would love to use tsdx right now, however:

• right now it’s a module only => cannot use it 🔴

• okay, I can fiddle around and make it CLI-only => still cannot use it 🔴

• if there would be a module + CLI setup => ✔️

If there would be a simple way to setup and build module+CLI packages, I am sure many lazy developers (like myself) would ship way more cool stuff. Right now the boilerplate barrier is too high.

[agilgur5]

You’re welcome to respond to previous comments. Otherwise, this issue is adding noise as a duplicate (and the comments are illustrative of that).