Setup

Here's the funnest part, you get to name your CLI! I'm going to call mine jarvis.

Start by creating a directory and changing into that directory:

mkdir jarvis && cd jarvis

Initialize git repo:

git init

Ignore node_modules:

echo "node_modules" > .gitignore

Add a README.md:

echo "# Jarvis CLI" > README.md

Initialize a package.json file:

npm init -y

Modify package.json

Add a bin key. This will be the command line tool's name:

package.json

"bin": {
    "jarvis": "./index.js"
},

Change the scripts section to include a plop script:

package.json

"scripts": {
    "plop": "plop"
},

Install plop

npm i -D plop

Create the index file where our plop setup is going to live:

touch index.js

Add Plop CLI instructions (source) by copying the following code into your index.js file:

index.js

#!/usr/bin/env node
import path from 'node:path';
import minimist from 'minimist';
import { Plop, run } from 'plop';

const args = process.argv.slice(2);
const argv = minimist(args);

import { dirname } from 'node:path';
import { fileURLToPath } from 'node:url';

const __dirname = dirname(fileURLToPath(import.meta.url));

const config = {
    cwd: argv.cwd,
    configPath: path.join(__dirname, 'plopfile.js'),
    preload: argv.preload || [],
    completion: argv.completion
};

const callback = (env) => Plop.execute(env, run);

Plop.prepare(config, callback);

The main take away from the code above is that Plop will launch in the current working directory and it will allow you pass parameters to your command line tool (more on this later).