How do I create a custom command to generate files with Node?

Question

For my job, we create a lot of small web applications with NodeJS for the backend and Angular for the frontend

Said apps usually involve a lot of CRUDs

With Angular, I can run:

ng generate component 'component-name'

Which generates the ts, html, scss, and spec files

How would I go about creating a custom script to do something similar in NodeJS?

Currently, the project uses ExpressJS and Sequelize, and the structure as follows:

├── src
│   ├── controllers
│   |   ├── product.controller.js
│   ├── models
|   |   ├── product.model.js
│   ├── routes
|   |   ├── product.routes.js
├── index.js
├── package.json

Basically I want to create a script that generates all 3 files when given the name, something like

node generate client

Is it possible?

Answer 1

You can simply do this by adding a bash script, and calling it in your package.json.

Step 1: create a bash script generate-controller-model-route.sh in the route folder

#!/bin/bash

file_name=$1

if [[ -z $file_name ]]; then
    echo "Error: file name not received."
    exit 1
fi
controller_folder='./src/controllers'
model_folder='./src/models'
route_folder='./src/routes'

touch "$controller_folder/$file_name.controller.js"
touch "$model_folder/$file_name.model.js"
touch "$route_folder/$file_name.route.js"

Step 2: add the bash script to the package.json (scripts property).

"scripts": {
        "generate": "bash ./api/generate-controller-model-route.sh $1"
}

Step 3: call it with yarn/npm

yarn generate client

Answer 2

In node you can make use of fs library to create folder and write files into it. for example like this,

const fs = require('fs');

const html = `custom starter html script as per your requirement`;
const css = `custom script as per your requirement`;
const js = `custom script as per your requirement`;

const folderName = process.argv[2];

function createFiles() {
  try{
    if(folderName) {
      fs.mkdirSync(`${folderName}`); //creates the folder name with the argument you have provided.
      fs.writeFileSync(`${folderName}\\index.html`,html); // writes to the folder you have created with the custom file contents.
  
}
}catch(e){
  console.log(`Error: ${e}`);
  }
  }
  
  
if(folderName){
  createFiles();
}else{
  console.log("Please enter the folder name");
 }