Build a JavaScript Command Line Interface (CLI) with Node.js

As great as Node.js is for “traditional” web applications, its potential uses are far broader. Microservices, REST APIs, tooling, working with the Internet of Things and even desktop applications: it’s got your back.

Another area where Node.js is really useful is for building command-line applications—and that’s what we’re going to be doing in this tutorial. We’re going to start by looking at a number of third-party packages designed to help work with the command line, then build a real-world example from scratch.

What we’re going to build is a tool for initializing a Git repository. Sure, it’ll run git init under the hood, but it’ll do more than just that. It will also create a remote repository on GitHub right from the command line, allow the user to interactively create a .gitignore file, and finally perform an initial commit and push.

The code accompanying this tutorial can be found in this GitHub repo.