HACKER Q&A
📣 daniel_iversen

Simple framework/way to create command-line apps?


This might seem like a weird request, but what’s the quickest way/framework to create command-line/terminal apps that uses REST APIs to reach and interact with arbitrary SaaS apps?

I’d like to try as an experiment to use some key apps via terminal (happy to host on a remote Linux server or MacOS and telnet in) to increase focus-time and go keyboard-only. I think for some apps (like email) there’s apps already, for others (like Slack) I’m sure someone has built something too, but for some (like Asana) I might need to create my own mini-Frontend for some key actions.

I’m ideally looking for some no-code/low—code or rapid prototyping framework and not just a “hey just built it from scratch in Node/python/powershell/php etc”

Hope it makes sense and thanks a lot in advance! :-)

  👤 xtreak29 Accepted Answer ✓
If you have the openapi spec then tools like below might help

https://dev.to/danielgtaylor/a-cli-for-rest-apis-part-1-104b https://github.com/danielgtaylor/restish https://github.com/danielgtaylor/openapi-cli-generator https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi-generator

👤 joshcanhelp
Oclif was one I used a while back but, last I tried it (a couple of months ago), there were either technical or documentation issues that made it a challenge to get started. It sounded like they were in the middle of fixes though so that might be worth a look. Combined with a solid HTTP package like axios, that would be a good leg up if you are proficient in JS.

Good list of options here:

https://github.com/shadawck/awesome-cli-frameworks

👤 bsingh4
https://jasperfx.github.io/oakton/
👤 duped
Python is perfect for this, why do you think it isn't appropriate?

The entire AWS CLI is written in Python, for example