aurelia-app-cli

what is the aurelia-app-cli plugin

Currently, the aurelia framework development environment is augmented with a Command Line Interface (a CLI). Mutatis Matandis, applications build with Aurelia can also benefit from a CLI. In general, a CLI allows a user to enter commands for performing various tasks in an application. Since a picture is worth a thousand words let's first look what an application CLI could look like:

A running application is worth a billion words:

https://paulvanbladel.github.io/aurelia-app-cli-sample

In which scenarios can a(n) (aurelia) SPA benefit from a command line interface

• prototype a feature that eventually will have a user interface.
• allow the execution of certain tasks to be executed in a more efficient way: certain tasks can sometimes be executed more efficiently in a CLI like manner.
• a 'backdoor' for fasciliating certain integration test scenarios.
• the return value of a command executed in aurelia-app-cli is not limited to text (you are right, very much indeed, here it's richer than aurelia-cli :) ), aurelia-app-cli allows also html or graphics.

features

• command history: key up and key down browses the command history
• commands can return text, html (and thus also images)
• command can be executed in parallel
• commands are wrapped inside a promise, command execution status (success or fail) results in different coloring of the command result
• a help command provides help on both the built-in commands (i.e. the command provided by default by aureli-app-cli) and the application specific commands (i.e. commands provided by the application consuming the aurelia-app-cli plugin).

future features

• hotkey for activating and hiding the command window
• improved 'scroll management'
• persist command history to browser storage (currently the history is reset when the CLS command is executed)
• more powerfull command parameter parsing

a bit more on the internals of aurelia-app-cli

• //TODO

Building The Code

To build the code, follow these steps.

1. Ensure that NodeJS is installed. This provides the platform on which the build tooling runs.
2. From the project folder, execute the following command:

npm install

3. Ensure that Gulp is installed. If you need to install it, use the following command:

npm install -g gulp

4. To build the code, you can now run:

gulp build

5. You will find the compiled code in the dist folder, available in three module formats: AMD, CommonJS and ES6.

6. See gulpfile.js for other tasks related to generating the docs and linting.