ff-reddit v0.1.0

Create a CLI Command (program)

CLI frameworks

• Keep in mind that there are entire Node frameworks to help with building out a CLI (just like there are server and frontend frameworks).
• Commander - the defacto standard
• oclif
• Caporal

Interpreter

#! /usr/bin/env node

• That hashbang tells the machine where to find the interpreter, which is Node.
• I believe it works b/c PATH is in the env and somewhere in the path it'll find Node (since Node's path location can/will be different on different machines depending on how it was installed).

package.json

• Register our new command (CLI) in the bin folder.
  • This instructs npm to do that (install our command in the user's bin folder) when a user uses npm to globally install our command.
• Need to tell Node.js what the name of our CLI is so when can actually use it in our terminal. Just have to add this section to our package.json:

{
  ...
  "bin": {
    "reddit": "./reddit.mjs"
  }
}

• reddit is the name of the CLI.
• "./reddit.mjs" is the path to the entry file for the command's code.
• Once installed, this package will have its bin command installed into your machine's bin folder allowing us to use the reddit command globally in the terminal.
  • All global commands exist in your machine's bin directory.
• The bin property (in package.json) is used when your package is used as a CLI.
• The main property (in package.json) is used when someone is importing your package (using import or require) into their project's code.
  • It points to the entry point for your package's code.

Install package globally

• We must install our own package globally on our machine so we can test out the CLI. We could just execute the file with the node runtime, but we want to see the CLI actually work.

npm install -g .

• We can simply install with no args (or .) which tells npm to install the current director. The -g flag means we want to globally install this package vs in a local project's node_modules folder.
• Can confirm it's been installed, and its location, with:

which reddit

Run command

# Will print to the console a random post's Title and Link
reddit --print

# Will open that random post in your default browser
reddit