cli-step

Cli steps ⛹

This module makes it super simple to show animated steps on the terminal and also track the time spent to perform those steps.

Highly inspired by yarn

Some bragging 🤘🏻

Below is the output of couple of examples of what you can do with cli-step.

Yarn style output

Publish to npm

Usage ✍️

Grab it from npm.

npm i cli-step
 
# yarn 
yarn add cli-step

const Steps = require('cli-step')
 
const totalNumberOfSteps = 4
const steps = new Steps(totalNumberOfSteps)
 
const step1 = steps
    .advance('Resolving packages', 'mag')
    .start()
 
// perform your task
step1.stop()
 
const step2 = steps
    .advance('Fetching packages', 'truck')
    .start()
 
// peform next task
step2.stop()

Note 🗒️

Cli steps doesn't gives you any functionality on how to perform certain actions, it's just a module to show animated steps of the tasks you are executing.

So think of it as the UI layer for your command line app.

Why? 🤷‍♂️

1. To produce consistent output
2. Everyone loves emoji's
3. Record time taken to perform all the steps.

API 👇🏻

Here's the list of methods you can call to tweak the output.

advance(text, emoji, helpLabel)

• text ( String ) [required] The text to be printed on the terminal. It is required
• emoji (String) [optional] Emoji to be printed just before the text. The emoji name must one of the available emojis from this list
• helpLabel (String) [optional] The help label to be printed in DIM color. For example showing the command used to execute the task

const steps = new Steps(4)
const stepInstance = steps.advance(text, emoji, helpLabel)

startRecording

Optionally, you can start recording the time which can later be used to know the time taken to execute all the tasks. Used in yarn example

const steps = new Steps(4)
steps.startRecording()
 
// perform all tasks
 
const nanoSeconds = steps.stopRecording()

stopRecording

Used to stop recording the time. The return value is the time spent between startRecording and stopRecording in nano seconds.

A single step ☝️

Everytime you call advance it returns an instance of the step class, which can be used to tweak the output, complete a step and so on.

const step1 = steps.advance('Linting...', null, 'npm run lint')
 
step1.start() // start the animation
 
try {
 // perform task
 
 step1.success('Successfully linted', 'white_check_mark')
} catch (error) {
  step1.error('Unable to lint', 'x')
}

start

The start method starts the animation for a given step.

step.start()

success(text, emoji)

• text ( String ) [optional] Optionally change the text on step completion
• emoji (String) [optional] Optionally change the emoji on step completion

step1.complete()
 
// or change text
step1.complete('Success')
 
// or change text and emoji
step1.complete('Success', 'white_check_mark')

error(text, emoji)

• text ( String ) [optional] Optionally change the text on error
• emoji (String) [optional] Optionally change the emoji on error

step1.error()
 
// or change text
step1.error('Ohh no!')
 
// or change text and emoji
step1.error('Ohh no!', 'x')

stop()

Same as error and complete but instead doesn't accept any params and just stops the animation.

update(text)

• text ( String ) [required] Update the step text during animation.

step1.start()
 
// after a while
step1.update('Changing the text')

Spinner 🤸‍♂️

The cli-spinner module is used to show the loading icon. You can tweak the behaviour by accessing the spinner property on the step instance.

const Steps = require('cli-step')
const steps = new Steps(1)
 
const step = steps.advance('Eating banana', 'banana')
 
// update the spinner string
step.spinner.setSpinnerString(10)
 
// start animation
step.start()

Props 🎉

The module is possible because of

• cli-spinner
• node-emoji
• colors
• yarn