Tool of the Trade for CLI Apps - `progress-string` 📟

This is a series of libraries and utilities for building Command-line-interfaces aka CLI using Node.js and ecosystem around it. Similar utilities/helpers may be available for other languages but, these series is focused on JavaScript and its friends.

You can check all articles under CLI Build Tool tag.

progress-string

If you are building a CLI and need to show exact progress of where the computation has reached, you need to know progress-string. Just like ora, it helps you show progress in the terminal. In case of ora, it was a loading spinner, while progess-string actually shows the traditional progress bar.

It generates a CLI progress bar as a string that you can then output in any way you like.

You can update the progress bar on the go, changing its position in the complete bar. You can also customize it using its style option.

progess-string has a very easy to follow, simple to use API. Here is a code example:

var progress = require('progress-string');
var diff = require('ansi-diff-stream')();

var value = 0;
var total = 42;
var bar = progress({ width: 50, total: total });

setInterval(function() {
	diff.write('The progress of the program is:\n' + bar(++value));
	if (value === total) process.exit();
}, 250);

diff.pipe(process.stdout);

You can check out official repo for all usage details.

Github Repo: progress-string