Inquirer is setup as a monorepo (using Yarn workspaces and Lerna.) It has been going through a complete rewrite over the last few years, and this is important to understand the structure.
First, there's packages/inquirer
which is the inquirer
package you'll find on npm. This is the most used package, and is the old version I wrote a long time ago.
Secondly, there's packages/core
(npm @inquirer/core
) which is the new framework developed to build prompts; and especially custom prompts more easily. It expose a hook based state management system akin to how React work. This interface is more intuitive to many FE devs, but the main goals of creating this version was:
- Lower the needs for a centralized package
- Drop most dependencies (and mainly the big RxJS dependency)
- Remove flow management from the core, which I find isn't useful and often leads users to assume they cannot use the JavaScript constructs they know to build their prompt flows (hundreds of support requests on the issue tracker).
The other packages, packages/input
, packages/checkbox
, packages/*
are the new reimplement core prompts from the inquirer
module, or utility packages.
This guide assumes you have an LTS Node.js installed (double check with node --version
.) You're free to manage the Node install & versions on your own - personally I like Volta.
Inquirer is relying on Yarn, you'll need it for things to work as expected. This is now built-in with Node corepack:
corepack enable
yarn install
At this point you should be good to go!
We're using vitest for all unit tests. And then have a few integration tests with the native Node.js test runner making sure different setups works (like CJS/ESM.)
To run everything:
yarn test
But during development, you'll have a better time running vitest in watch mode for quicker iteration:
yarn vitest
# or
yarn vitest --ui --coverage
yarn eslint . --fix
yarn prettier --write .
yarn tsc
# This command will launch tsc in watch mode
yarn dev
# Then run the demos
yarn demo
(PR idea: Adding a watch mode for this flow would be great!)
Note: This can only be done by someone with permission to the org on npm
.
yarn lerna publish