CMND

Command Line Interface Utility for Node.js

CMND is a package that lets you easily create CLI tools in Node.js. It's also simple to create associated manual (help) pages for each command.

Usage

To use CMND, first install it in your Node project with npm install cmnd --save.

Next, modify your project's package.json to include:

"bin": {
  "mycli": "./cli.js"
}

Where mycli is the intended name of your command in the CLI.

Now create a file: ./cli.js and folder ./commands:

#!/usr/bin/env node

'use strict';

const { CommandLineInterface } = require('cmnd');
const CLI = new CommandLineInterface();

CLI.load(__dirname, './commands');
CLI.run(process.argv.slice(2));

Finally, populate your commands directory with your commands, here's an example file: ./commands/example.js

const { Command } = require('cmnd');

class ExampleCommand extends Command {

  constructor() {
    // Name of the command
    super('example');
  }

  help () {
    return {
      description: 'An example command',
      args: ['example_arg1', 'example_arg2'],
      flags: {flag: 'An example flag'},
      vflags: {vflag: 'An example verbose flag'}
    };
  }

  async run (params) {
    // Run code here.
    // To throw an error, throw new Error('an error')
    // To return a result that gets printed to console, return notUndefinedVar;
  }

}

module.exports = ExampleCommand;

Creating manual pages (help)

View all the commands available to your CLI with mycli help where mycli is the intended name of your command in the CLI. To modify help information, change the return value of the help() method for each command.

Creating Subcommands

To subclass a command (i.e. mycli command_name:sub_name) simply change the contructor() method in your command to the following:

constructor () {

  super('command_name', 'sub_name');

}

Running your commands

Each command has a run() method which takes three arguments: args, flags, and vflags.

args

args is the array of arguments, passed before any flags.

i.e. mycli command alpha beta would populate args with ['alpha', 'beta']

flags

flags is an object containing any flags (prefixed with -), where each entry is an array of values passed after the flag

i.e. mycli command -f my flag would populate vflags with {f: ['my', 'flag']}

vflags

vflags works identically to flags, but with "verbose flags" (prefixed with --).

Additional notes

All argument arrays passed to args or any flags or vflags options will be separated by spaces, except in the case of quotation marks. Use quotation marks to specify an argument with spaces in it.

i.e. mycli command -f "argument one" argument_two

Acknowledgements

Thanks for checking out the library! Feel free to submit issues or PRs if you'd like to see more features.

Follow me on Twitter, @keithwhor.

Feel free to check out more of my GitHub projects.