Cliche

Use a hierarchical directory tree to hold your CLI app multi-level subcommands.

This came about from a desire to add more structure to a tool with many nested subcommands, something that can be achieved in other modules, but often with a non-trivial amount of boilerplate. From a performance standpoint Cliche is lazy loading to be as quick as possible even when dealing with very large numbers of subcommands.

For those that like backronyms, how about: CLI Command Hierarchy Executor?

Usage

Install with npm.

npm install cliche

index.js

'use strict'

const cliche = require('cliche')

cliche({
  name: 'cliche-example',
  root: './app',
  routes: [
    'commander',
    'foo/bar',
    'foo/baz',
    'hello/world'
  ]
})

app structure

example
├── app
│   ├── commander.js      # example integration with commander
│   ├── foo
│   │   ├── bar.js        # example commands
│   │   ├── baz.js
│   │   └── .meta.js      # metadata for the foo group
│   ├── hello
│   │   └── world.js
│   ├── .meta.js          # metadata for the root group
│   └── .version.js       # version information
├── index.js
└── package.json

Compatibility

Cliche can integrate with other CLI frameworks and option parsers on a command by command basis. An example integration with commander can be found in example/app/commander.js.

A very complementary module is glob which can remove the overhead of maintaining a list of routes. An example of how this can be achieved can be found in example/globbed.js.

Metadata

There are two levels of metadata: the command level and the directory level.

Command

Currently the only metadata supported for commands is a description used for generating usage information. It can be set on module.exports.description of the relevant command.

example/app/hello/world.js

$ node example hello
[...]
Available subcommands:

  world  a computer program that outputs "Hello, World!"

Directory

Directories function as parent commands, and as such have both a short description which acts as a summary when viewing the parent command, and a longer, more informational about to be shown when in the current command. These values are contained in .meta.js files in the directory itself.

example/app/foo/.meta.js

$ node example
[...]
Available subcommands:

  foo        serves only to demonstrate a concept

$ node example foo
usage: cliche-example foo <command> [<args>]

A parent to both the bar and baz nested subcommands.

Available subcommands:
[...]

Version

A top-level --version flag can be supported by providing a .version.js file.

example/app/.version.js

$ node example --version
version 1.0.0

Example

All commands shown in this file can be run from the root of the repo, and the example project can be copied to use as a base for a new project. The example app is fully usable to get a feel for how Cliche works, here are some commands to try:

$ node example
$ node example --version
$ node example foo
$ node example foo bar now we can pass some arguments
$ node example hello world
$ node example commander --cherries