A well-designed Node.js CLI tool can make life better, for you and your users. But what’s the best way to design one that meets user needs, and then how do you pick the libraries to help you build it?

Which library will you use to parse the command-line arguments? And which will you use to ask questions and get responses from your users? How about getting data from an external API? That’s a lot of decisions, and potentially a lot of libraries!

Node.js core is evolving all the time and the libraries you might have relied on before to build CLIs aren’t always needed. Newer APIs such as parseArgs, readline/promises and fetch give us exciting new opportunities for building CLI tools with Node.js.

In this workshop we’ll explore what makes a human friendly CLI and how we can leverage Node.js core to help our users achieve their goals, and live their best command-line lives.