Bluebun is a CLI framework inspired by Gluegun, but specifically designed to be used with Bun, the new JS runtime.
Bun is an incredibly fast JS runtime. It's essentially a Node competitor.
If you want to support Node, you can always use the delightful Gluegun instead! Gluegun comes with a ton of useful tools and patterns for making CLIs and is battle-tested.
Bluebun, on the other hand, is designed to be extremely fast and no-dependencies and ONLY work with Bun. You'll run your CLI with bunx rather than npx, for example, and we rely on Bun APIs and have rewritten (or will rewrite) all the important parts of Gluegun from scratch for speed and lightweightness.
Generally speaking, other options are either too slow, too complex, have too many dependencies, or lack the basic feature set that Bluebun has.
Gluegun: Gluegun is a great CLI framework, but it's designed to work with Node and has a ton of dependencies. It has file-based command routing, like Bluebun. The API is a bit more complex than we'd like due to relying on so many dependencies. Bluebun is designed to be a simpler, faster, no-dependencies alternative to Gluegun.
Oclif: Oclif is a popular CLI framework. It's also designed to work with Node and is quite a bit slower than Bluebun, and has many dependencies, including Yeoman.
Commander: Commander.js is a very popular and lightweight Node CLI library. It has no dependencies, but also lacks most of the features that Bluebun and Gluegun have. For example, there's no built-in template system, no built-in prompts, etc. It's just a very simple command router. You end up having to bring your own dependencies for most things.
Caporal: Caporal is another Node option. It also has lots of dependencies, including Inquirer. It's a bit more complex than Commander, but has a lot more features. It's also slower than Bluebun, like all of these other options.
Yeoman: Yeoman is a scaffolding tool. It's not a CLI framework, but it's often used to scaffold projects. It's quite a bit more complex than Bluebun, and has a lot of dependencies, including Lodash, Inquirer, and Chalk. It's also slower than Bluebun.
- It's under heavy construction, so tons of stuff doesn't work right now and the API is very unstable, changing every release
- We will not support Node (until Bun releases
node-bun, and then we'll consider it) - We will not support Windows (until Bun does, and then we'll consider it)
- We don't currently plan to support Gluegun-style plugins (although this may change)
Next: Getting Started