metarunnerjs

metarunnerjs

A tool for generating meta-runners for Node CLI Tools

metarunner allows you to generate a thin CLI tool that can be installed -g so your consumers don't have to install a bulky library at the global level or be tied to a global dependency for projects, while allowing them to use your command in the command line.

Installation

Within your cli project, run:

npm install metarunner --save

Usage

To scaffold out your thin command line utility, from within your project simply run:

node ./node_modules/.bin/metarunner

This will prompt you for a few questions and generate your CLI tool after you've answered all the prompts.

Example Workflow

metarunnerjs generates a thin CLI runner that looks for a project's local dependency of the same name of the command being run.

For instance, I create a package called howl that has a bin in its package.json and when I run it, it will output the text "howl".

I would have a project dependency in my project on the howl package, but I would only be able to access it by adding it as a script to the package.json of my project.

If I use the metarunnerjs package, I can create a howl-cli (this is the recommended naming convention), which, when initialized, will add a bin entry to check for the dependency in your project and then run that dependencies bin.