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Introduction

First Steps

The Guide will lead you through building your first Orbital CLI, and will go over the fundamentals of the Orbital framework.

Language

Orbital is built with TypeScript, and we recommend developers do the same. Orbital has not been rigorously tested with pure JavaScript, and the documentation will have exclusively TypeScript examples.

Prerequisites

Please make sure that Node.JS (>=6.0.0) is installed on your operating system. We recommend Node 8 or later. You will also need TypeScript v2.7 or later, and NPM v3 or later.

Setup

Setting up a new project is quite simple with the starter. You can clone the repo and get started with these commands:

git clone https://github.com/orbital-js/starter project-name
cd project-name
npm install

The project directory will contain several core files inside src directory.

src
└── main.ts
└── cli.ts
└── commands
    └── hello.command.ts

These files each serve an important and unique purpose, outlined in the table below.

File	Description
main.ts	The entry point to your CLI. Provides bootstrapping logic to render the CLI.
cli.ts	Defines the primary CLI instance of the application.
commands/hello.command.ts	A single executable command with business logic for when the command is triggered.

The main.ts includes an single function, which responsibility is to bootstrap our application:

import { OrbitalFactory } from '@orbital/core';
import { MyCLI } from './cli';

OrbitalFactory.bootstrap(MyCLI)
    .execute(process.argv);

To instantiate the application, the bootstrap method handles all of the command resolution and injection. The execute method accepts an array of strings, typically process.argv, as the command line input. It can be useful, however, to substitute in other arrays, particularly during testing. We will cover this in a later guide.

Running Your CLI

Once you've downloaded and installed the starter, you can run this command to make sure that everything is configured properly.

$ npm start -- hello
Welcome to Orbital CLI!

If everything worked correctly, you'll see "Welcome to Orbital CLI!" output below the command.