Building an interactive CLI app in Elixir
summary
Argues that CLIs should be first‑class in Elixir and shows concrete tooling and pitfalls: use Licenser style mix tasks, IO.gets/IO.puts with IO.ANSI for colored output, and OptionParser for argument parsing; avoid hand‑rolled parsers. Covers releases using distillery commands instead of escripts, redirecting stdout vs stderr, returning proper exit codes (0/1) with System.halt, and prefer flag-based inputs over prompts for automation so CI (example CircleCI) and pipes with jq keep working.
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chapters (18)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:11LifeSensor
- 1:27Agenda
- 1:40Why CLI
- 2:56Composability
- 5:07Developer Experience
- 6:07CLI tools in Elixir
- 6:26API Docs
- 7:28Option Parse
- 8:27Demo
- 9:26Complicated
- 9:39Question
- 10:58Common commands
- 12:59User prompts
- 14:05Exit codes
- 14:59Summary
- 15:30Further Resources
- 16:04Outro
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