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What do you use these days to build simple CLI tools in Node? Is sade still the go-to, or do you go plain node:util parseArgs() and some manual wrangling? I have a CLI tool that has 3-4 subcommands with 1-2 options each. Wonder how many dependecies I'm willing to accept here. Maybe @e18e.dev knows?

4/6/26, 9:07 am1 repost7 likes

Mastro.{js,ts}

@mastrojs.bsky.social

4 June

parseArgs from node:util gets you quite far! (I’m using it here: github.com/mastrojs/mas...)

This! I just migrated from an unmaintained args parser to parseArgs and it does everything I wanted! I even used the config that I pass to parseArgs for generating --help! github.com/git-truck/gi...

github.comgithub.com

Mastro.{js,ts}

@mastrojs.bsky.social

4 June

Yes, same here! :-) btw. instead of Object.entries(getArgOptions()).reduce etc., you could do Math.max(...Object.keys(getArgOptions()).map etc.

Jonas Røssum

@nimrossum.com

4 June

Oh, good point. I think I do it like that because I once read that there is a limit of the amount of args you can give to Math.max, but in this case it would make the code much simpler!

Bernd de Ridder

@berndderidder.nl

4 June

I've used commander which has zero dependencies github.com/tj/commander...

parseArgs gets you a long way. I personally use sade quite a bit too, and we're also working on something to fill this gap in bombshell 👀

Bart Veneman

@veneman.dev

5 June

See, I was expecting bombshell to have exactly what I needed after seeing all the positive reviews. Thanks for noticing and I sincerely hope this is the nerd snipe you mentioned yesterday 😂

warpfork

@warpfork.bsky.social

4 June

Saw @bomb.sh 's bomb.sh/blog/introdu... floating around the other day, seems interesting. Haven't tried it yet but I notice it supports several args parse libraries and so all of those are now on my research todo list next time I make a cli!