Execute a command line binary with Node.js

Question

I am in the process of porting a CLI library from Ruby over to Node.js. In my code I execute several third party binaries when necessary. I am not sure how best to accomplis

Answer 1

You can use execa.

For example, as a promise:

const execa = require('execa')

execa('cat *.js bad_file').then(
  (childProcessResult) => {
    //onFulfilled
    console.log('Success!', childProcessResult)
  },
  (childProcessResult) => {
    //onRejected
    console.log('Error!', childProcessResult)
  }
)

Execa improves child_process methods with:

• Promise interface.
• Strips the final newline from the output so you don't have to do stdout.trim().
• Supports shebang binaries cross-platform.
• Improved Windows support.
• Higher max buffer. 100 MB instead of 200 KB.
• Executes locally installed binaries by name.
• Cleans up spawned processes when the parent process dies.
• Get interleaved output from stdout and stderr similar to what is printed on the terminal. (Async only)
• Can specify file and arguments as a single string without a shell
• More descriptive errors.