Beacon CLI

The Beacon CLI package lets you install and use the Beacon CLI from a Node project with npm/yarn.

Installation

To install it for a single project, run:

npm install beacon-cli

Or to install it for your whole computer, run:

npm install -g beacon-cli

Setting up your site

This module adds the Beacon CLI command to your node_modules path. You can use the CLI directly like so:

# using npm
./node_modules/.bin/beacon <command>

# or with yarn
yarn beacon <command>

To use the Beacon CLI, you'll need to authenticate to tell Beacon which user account and site you're trying to use. Normally, you'd run beacon login and authenticate in a browser, but that doesn't work if you're using a build server, like Netlify, Vercel, or some other CI system.

In this case, you can use an API token. Generate a new token on the Beacon site. Add that token as an environment variable named BEACON_API_TOKEN to your build system. Beacon will use that environment variable to set the account for the site. (You can also pass this as the --token=<token> flag to any Beacon command.)

For most uses, you'll want to work Beacon into your build scripts. Often times this is the scripts section in your package.json file. For example, when building a site with hugo:

{
  "name": "my-site",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "scripts": {
    "build": "beacon pull -d <path-to-content> && hugo"
  }
}

Background

Beacon's CLI is built in Go and distributed as a static binary through npm. When installing this module, a postinstall script will automatically download the right binary and let npm/yarn know about it.

License

MIT