Luciano Mammino 𝕏 Node.js Design Patterns Profile picture
Sep 15, 2022 β€’ 10 tweets β€’ 6 min read β€’ Read on X
Here are 6 of my favorite third-party libraries when building CLI applications using #NodeJS

Want to know why?πŸ‘‡πŸ§΅
commander ➑️ npm.im/commander

Simple yet powerful command-line argument parser. It automatically generates help messages and can be configured to support multiple commands.

I ❀️ it bc it's not prescriptive, you can organize the code as you want (1 file or more).
conf ➑️ npm.im/conf

How many times did you have to store settings (creds & other preferences)? Where do you save the conf file? Which format do you use? How do you load and update the file?

Conf takes care of all of this (and more!) with an extremely simple API
enquirer ➑️ npm.im/enquirer

Did you ever need to interactively collect user data? Like a web form, but in a CLI app!

Enquirer offers you many ways to do that: from simple text prompt to more advanced input components!
open ➑️ npm.im/open

Do you want to open the user browser to a specific URL from your CLI app? Do you need to open another application, for instance, Visual Studio Code?

Good luck doing that correctly for every OS if you are not using something like `open`!
ora ➑️ npm.im/ora

What do you do when your CLI needs to wait for a resource to be loaded or for the user to complete an operation somewhere else (e.g. auth in a browser window)?

Of course, YOU SHOW A CATCHY SPINNER! 😜

`ora` does just that and it's beautiful!
cli-progress ➑️ npm.im/cli-progress

Back to waiting... what if you can show some real progress (like when downloading or uploading a file somewhere)?

Progress bars are a well-known solution and with `cli-progress` you can have dynamic progress bars in your terminal πŸ€“
🧐 What do you think? Do you have other CLI-related libraries that you like and use often?

Let me know here! I am always curious to learn from all of you! πŸ₯°
If you liked this thread and want to see more of this, please consider following me and re-sharing this post!

I'd be grateful for that 🧑

πŸ“Ή If you want to see me using some of these utilities, @eoins and I are hosting a series of live streams where we build a file transfer app from scratch on #AWS (with CLI app included!)

You can follow the next one here:

β€’ β€’ β€’

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More from @loige

Aug 3, 2022
"Yo, why are #JavaScript and its ecosystem so messy?!" 😑

Well, I am glad you asked... Let me tell you a story! πŸ€“

πŸ§΅πŸ‘‡
For starting... #JavaScript was not designed to be the language that it is today!

JS was created in 1995 by @BrendanEich for Netscape, a web browser that was trying to come up with a language to make the web more interactive
@BrendanEich #JS wasn't related w/ #Java, so why did they call it Java-Script?! Duh! 😳

Java was trendy! it was possible to build interactive sites by embedding Java apps in pages (applets). So it was mostly a #mktg move: "JS: the lightweight Java alternative" or something like that I guess
Read 40 tweets
May 25, 2021
I have been confused for a while on what's the best way to implement a "to string" functionality for a #Rust struct. πŸ¦€

The reason why this has been confusing to me is that there are indeed many ways to do that and they all have different purposes!

This is what I learned

πŸ‘‡πŸ§΅
The first thing that you can do is to just implement a simple `to_string()` function directly on your struct!

play.rust-lang.org/?version=stabl…
This is easy and it works! But the implementation is very specific to our struct.

The rest of the codebase doesn't really know that this type can be converted to a String and therefore you cannot build abstractions on top of this... 🀨
Read 23 tweets
Oct 1, 2020
Do you know what's in a #JWT token?

Here's a quick thread to learn something about this! πŸ‘‡
A JWT token (JSON Web Token) is just a string with a well-defined format. A sample token might look like this:

```
eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJoZWxsbyI6ImZyb20gSldUIn0.XoByFQCJvii_iOTO4xlz23zXmb4yuzC3gqrWNt3EHrg
```
There are 3 parts separated by a `.` (dot) character:

- header: eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9
- body: eyJoZWxsbyI6ImZyb20gSldUIn0
- signature: XoByFQCJvii_iOTO4xlz23zXmb4yuzC3gqrWNt3EHrg
Read 13 tweets
Sep 17, 2020
@eleven_ty micro tip: Give eleventy some credit by injecting a "generator" meta tag in your HTML! πŸ”₯

Frontpage and Dreamweaver used to get credit this way, why shouldn't we give Eleventy some credit too? πŸ˜‡

(a short thread in 3 steps πŸ‘‡) Image
STEP 1. Create a data file in `_data/site.js` with the following content: Image
STEP 2. Create your base layout `_includes/layout.njk` and use the variable `{{ site.generator }}`: Image
Read 8 tweets
Aug 18, 2020
✨ Rob Pike's 5 Rules of #programming ✨

#golang #simplicity

πŸ§΅πŸ‘‡
1️⃣ You can't tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so don't try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you've proven that's where the bottleneck is.
2️⃣ Measure. Don't tune for speed until you've measured, and even then don't unless one part of the code overwhelms the rest.
Read 7 tweets
Aug 11, 2020
Software engineering #anxiety, let's talk about it. Specifically, let me try to deconstruct my personal anxiety

πŸ§΅πŸ‘‡
1️⃣ classic impostor syndrome: it doesn't matter how good I actually am with some technology/tool/technique. Even if I can get the job done, it still feels far from adequate and I feel like I have to rush to get better to defend my job title & credibility...
2️⃣ future tech gamble: tech is always changing and I need to be ready for the next big thing if I want to stay relevant in the market. But what is the next big thing? I don't know, of course, so I try to check out as many things as I can and often end up feeling overwhelmed! 🀯
Read 6 tweets

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