Hello, People! Another week, another blog! If you don’t know me yet and curious to know, take a look at my very first blog, This week’s blog is quite technical. It is a note to myself to mark my progress in my first attempt of making a command line tool. I made a command line tool using node.js. It checks URL to report if it is a good, bad, does not exist or unknown link.
First Phase: Make a Simple CLI
When I heard first time the word, command line tool, I was 99.99% sure I will scream at my laptop the whole week trying to figure it out. Fortunately, the google and node.js made it much easier. Here is the tutorial I used to get me started. I successfully made my CLI and named it fbl which is the acronym of find broken link.
Second Phase: Add Argument
Next phase is to manage arguments. One scenario is with no argument. In that case, I displayed message to let the user know that argument is required and how to use fbl.
Another scenario is with argument which can be a file name or a single URL. I created two options: ‘-f’, ‘--fileName’ for file and ‘-u’, ‘ — url’ for url. Other options available are: ‘--help,’ ‘--version’ as you can see in the above picture.
Third Phase: Managing File
After adding the file options, the next step is to read the file and find the URL with http and https. I used line-reader library to extract and read the file line by line. I found this library useful as you are not responsible to track when you reach at the end of line or the file. To find the exact URL, I used `match` and stored the output in a array.
Final Phase: Checking the URL
Now we have our links from the file, let’s do the final step. I used `fetch` to get the response of URL. Upon receiving the status code of URL, four messages were displayed: good with status code` 200`, bad with status code `400` and `404`, not exist with URL that throws error, and last but not the least unknown with any other status codes. To make my output more reader friendly, I used chalk library.
Install my CLI
Check my git repo and install it following README.md instructions. Any feedback is appreciated. It is my first time building CLI. Therefore, I am sure that mistake can be found but as we all know we learn best from our mistake. So, please point out any mistake or recommendation you have. I will add more features and improvement in future. Keep an eye on the repo. Until then, goodbye, friends!
