How to publish a package to NPM with custom CLI

Question

I created a folder structure developed for project in Nodejs, but I would like to publish it in NPM with a custom CLI, so that it was possible to choose what to install, something like: myPackageName --beta=server where this would install only the server folder, or myPackageName --beta=webdevelopment where this would install only webdevelopment folder.

In case this myPackageName would be available after installing the main project via npm.

Answer 1

In these cases what is done is to publish a package with the product name, but with an external layer that is the installer itself. That is, when downloading the package it can not use, only after running the myPackageName --beta=server. And in that case it would be better to give it another name.

That means you have a program instalador.js where you can read the arguments passed to the script deploy (you can of course change this name). That file would have something like:

const args = process.argv;
const envVariables = args
  .slice(2)
  .join("")
  .split("--")
  .filter(Boolean)
  .reduce((vars, envVar) => {
    const [key, value] = envVar.split("=");
    return { ...vars, [key]: value };
  }, {});

console.log(envVariables);

With this code you could use for example:

node instalador --beta=server --lang=en

and within the file it would return:

{ beta: 'server', lang: 'en' }

That is, you can go on and add to that code the rest of logic knowing that envVariables.beta has the value you seek.