Commandline tools with Nodejs

Hi everyone,

sometimes you need a small tool like but you might be working for an extended period of time in Node.js so that you don´t want to
switch languages and loose time and momentum on it. You want to do it quickly, but correctly to be able to reuse it in one way or another at a later point.
This is what today is about about.

I will show you quickly how to do a template for commandline arguments and handling them comfortably, so that you have this off your plate.

Here is the code for it:

'use strict'

const commandLineArgs = require('command-line-args')

// Commandline handling
const optionDefinitions = [
{ name: 'folder', alias: 'f', type: String }
]

const options = commandLineArgs(optionDefinitions)

// Add the path to your files
const folder = options.folder
// '/Users/$YourUsername/Downloads/customerdata';
console.log(`Given folder:${folder}`)

Explanation:

I use the npm package command-line-args to be able to handle commandline arguments easily.
Line 3: At first we import the command-line-args package.
Line 6: Then we define the options we want to be able to use. I chose an option folder with the type string.

Line 10: After we defined them we feed then to commandLineArgs and it parses them for use and returns a json document with the result.

Line 13: In that result we have properties with the name we defined in our options and we can extract them like we are used to.

If you save it as template.js, the following syntax is supported on the commandline:

node template.js --folder $YourFolder
node template.js --folder=$YourFolder
node template.js -f $YourFolder

As you can see we do have defined long and short form of the parameter that is required.

You can find the file on https://github.com/FrankTheDevop/cli-template too.
The npm package you find on https://www.npmjs.com/package/command-line-args and it´s repo on https://github.com/75lb/command-line-args.

I hope I could help you save some time i research and trial & error with this short nugget.

Yours Sincerely,
Frank

Sources:
(1) https://flaviocopes.com/node-cli-args/
(2) https://code-maven.com/argv-raw-command-line-arguments-in-nodejs
(3) https://codeburst.io/need-for-promises-and-rookie-mistakes-to-avoid-when-using-promises-9cabba215e04