Filip Maj & Michael Brooks - Master the Command Line with Node.js

JSConf US 2013

31 May 2013

patterns to follow emerged from concepts discovered while building tools (learned the hard way) - phonegap

Tools used by people and some of them are used by other tools to delegate responsibility

Found CLI qualities that are useful…

will be sharing 4 & explaining how to implement them in node suggestions not requirements - this is how they did it

A command-line interface should be testable

node community very diligent for testing modules rarely do this with CLI stuff we release have struggled to test the CLI originally tried testing by shell execution - really slow, results were vague this testing susceptible to false positives

We want to programmatically test CLI this can be done by treating the CLI as a module slim down the bin/ script to proxy into the CLI module - treat it as an interfact to the module

instead of all the bin script being in that file (e.g. bin/jsconf.js) have that file just require a lib/cli/x.js file and the bin script initiates it

extract functionality in to different files, test CLI as a module as a result, because you can fake process.argv so you can programatically send in arguments as if they’d been entered on the commandline

CLI module should ONLY have CLI functionality, keep it clean net result: testable CLI without doing anything especially creative

CLI should be helpful

People are using your tool, so they will almost certainly need help to make things work.·

Meaningful help output to assist people is extremely important

It’s convenient to hard-code the helpful messages in the logic - big ugly strings buried in code- hard to maintain/find/contribute to - so far from ideal if you’re hoping to keep the help messages helpful

easier way to document - and it’s obvious… use text files that map to specific commands or general usage - in a doc/ folder for instance, cli folder, help.METHOD.txt content of text files is familiar to any –help output you’ve seen in *nix Easy to find and show relevant help when needed.

if arguments are cli-executable help file create, then this results in reading a file at doc/cli/help/file/create.txt or doc/cli/help/file.create.txt, etc (based on personal style/preference)

Use templating and markdown libraries when plain text isn’t good enough.

A CLI should be bipolar

Sometimes it’s nice to have verbose tool when things go wrong Other times (most of the time) it’s nice for the tool to be quiet when things go right

But how to implement this? event emitters work well. Main lib is chatty - tells what’s doing all over. But you don’t have to listen to it - you can hook up a listener and console.log it if requested/it makes sense, you can add levels so you can listen just to the ones you care about, or not listen at all.

e.g. only want it to console.log stuff if things go wrong? listen to ‘error’ level messages / listen to all if you want it to be super verbose, don’t listen if you want it to be quiet, etc.

Therefore you have detailed messages you can turn on or off wherever you’re consuming the CLI

CLI should be interoperable

important to be nice to others / play nice to others. Not uncommon for tools to use tools to build better tools. Only way for this to really work is with good communication between tools and conventions. Exit codes are important - don’t ignore them.

process.exit(0) - 0 means successful completion (usually) process.exit(1) etc

allow output format to be specified - e.g. your messages are plain text or JSON or can be better formatted to return certain information only, etc - so others can work with your tool.

Try to avoid hard-coding paths into your code - like using ‘./’ in paths - kills windows. Use path.join() - standard lib - which will handle this for you

npm is windows-friendly so scripts add binaries to PATH - from package.json when you npm install (only binaries) so you don’t need paths, which are tricky as different on windows / *nix

Slides: http://michaelbrooks.ca/deck/jsconf2013

Twitter: @filmaj

Twitter: @mwbrooks

JSConf 2013

This is a quick summary of a talk I attended at JSConf 2013. You can see a list of all those I've summarized notes from here. There's also a General thoughts during JSConf 2013 post for all the non-talk bits and pieces.

There were 3 concurrent tracks at the conference, so only those I attended myself are summarized here. Other attendees have summarized some of the talks I didn't get to due to scheduling conflicts - you can find those at jlongster.com (James Long) and Toby Ho's github repo.