package-options

The single point to load config for your node package

It reads:

• command line arguments
• environment variables
• package.json
• ${yourPackage}.config.json
• ${yourPackage}.config.js
• other custom sources

Features:

• Converts options from CLI and ENV to camelCase

  --log-level → logLevel; MY_LOG_LEVEL → logLevel

• Converts negative flags like

  --no-log → log = false

• Converts dot-separated values to object

  --filter.name John → { filter: { name: 'John' } }

• Converts number and boolean parameters to the corresponding type

Usage

1. Install with npm:

   npm install -g package-options

2. Use in your code

// $ env MYMODULE_DEBUG=yes mymodule arg1 -a -b 1 -c 1 -c 2
import options from 'package-options';
 
console.log(options._); // ['arg1']
console.log(options.a); // true
console.log(options.b); // 1
console.log(options.c); // [1, 2]
console.log(options.debug); // true

Data sources

Let's imagine the project of some end-user:

some-project
├─┬node_modules
│ ├─┬mymodule        - the NPM package you're working on
│ │ └──index.js      - const options = require('package-options');
│ ├──package-options
│ └──...
├──index.js
└──package.js        - "dependencies": { "mymodule": "*" }

mymodule might be installed global instead, in that case the behavior is the same

So, end-user runs npx mymodule --some-arg 1. By default, 'package-options':

• Determines a name of the parent module (mymodule).
• Reads mymodule section of some-project/package.json
• Reads some-project/mymodule.config.json
• Reads some-project/mymodule.config.js
• Reads all environment variables which have 'MYMODULE' prefix
• Reads command lines arguments

If you want to skip options loading from the default sources:

options.reset() // skip loading from default sources
  .loadCmd()
  .loadFile('my-custom.config.json');

Load options from another sources

• From object

  options.load({ someOptions: 1 })

• From command line

  options.loadCmd(process.argv.slice(2))

  argument argv is optional

• From environment variables

  options.loadEnv('MY', process.env) // only ENV vars prefixed with 'MY' options.loadEnv(['NODE_ENV', 'LOG']) // only exact ENV vars

  all arguments are optional

• From file

  options.loadFile('.mymodulerc') options.loadFile(['config.js', 'other.mymodule'])

  loadFile() loads file content from some-project/${fileName}. If there is no such a file, it tries to find it in upper folders. If the second argument is specified, it reads only the data at specified path of data object. JS and JSON files are supported.

Read and write options

You can easily manipulate options:

console.log(options.someValue) options.someValue = 2

There are helpers .get() and .set() which allow to easily manipulate nested data without existence check:

options.get('not.existed.key', 'Default value') options.set('not.existed.key', 'Parent objects will be created')

To get a pure JS object contained all loaded options you can call options.toJSON()

Better parameters processing

options.param('log.level', { // can be applied to a nested parameter
  alias: 'l',
  type: 'number', // number, string or boolean
  default: 2,
})

All keys of the second argument are optional.

Here is an shortcut to define parameters with boolean type:

options.boolean(['showLine', 'colors']);

Displaying help text

The package has a helper which simplifies help printing in CLI. It can:

• automatically normalize space indents
• parse command line arguments from help text

options.help(`
  Usage: mymodule [OPTIONS]
  Options:
    -f, --file STRING       Input file
    -l, --log-level NUMBER  Log level 0-5
        --help              Show this help
`, helpOptions)

Using this help text has the same effect as:

options
  .param('file', { alias: 'f', type: 'string' })
  .param('logLevel', { alias: 'l', type: 'number' })

The optional second argument of .help() may contain the following options:

• autoShow: if false, it won't process --help CLI argument automatically
• paddingBottom: add n blank lines before the text
• paddingLeft: add n leading spaces
• paddingTop: add n blank lines after the text

Additional settings

package-options has the following options itself, which can be set using options.config(cfg) method:

• name: Explicitly set parent package name
• params: You can set parameters here instead of callings .param()
• inferTypes: By default, package-options tries to convert parameters from CLI and ENV to the corresponding type, like '2' → 2, 'yes' → true. Set false to disable.
• projectPath: By default, it uses process.cwd() to get the path of the current project (path to some-project in the example above). The path is used by .loadFile(). If you need to get this path in you code use options.getProjectPath().