CLI with Inquirer

Reading Materials

• CLI with Commander and Inquirer
• Inquirer CLI Example
• Inquirer on GitHub

CLI with Commander and Inquirer

• Commander was used in this tutorial to review the command line arguments and assign an action to each of the valid options.
  • In addition, a description tag and an alias was added to each command line option. This enables a faster user experience and Commander will use the description field to automatically build a help output.
• Commander can be used to parse rather flexible and potentially complex argument lists
  • example: .option('-s, --sugar [value]', 'Sugar level', "Low") // args.sugar = value, optional, default is 'Low'

Inquirer on GitHub

• Inquirer.js strives to be an easy-to-embed and beautiful command line interface for Node.js
• This makes it very good at:
  • providing error feedback
  • asking questions and parsing input
  • validating answers
  • managing hierarchical prompts
• This makes it very bad at:
  • repeated action flows
    • for repeatable action flows, use Commander to build a command-line engine than can make repeated calls to Inquirer
• There is a very helpful example script using Inquirer that walks through a pizza-ordering process
  • I installed the example in C:\Users\davet\alchemy\career-track\sandbox\lib\inquirer
  • Also, this example is available online from: https://github.com/SBoudrias/Inquirer.js/blob/master/packages/inquirer/examples/pizza.js