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Thousands of tools for the command-line interface (CLI) are out there, without exaggeration. They serve all kinds of purposes. Yarn is one of the most used CLIs in the world, bringing ease to the package management of millions of projects. Others are narrower in scope, serving as a way to communicate with a particular tool such as Webpack (webpack-cli) or TypeScript (tsc).
Every CLI serves its purpose, but they all have one thing in common: the interface part of the name. While it might seem odd or mystifying to the less technical people out there, it is one of the most common ways in which people communicate with and control programs. It’s especially odd when we remember that it’s the oldest way that people have interacted with a computer that didn’t involve plastic punch cards or uploading a program into the computer through some other means.
While people have come up with all kinds of ways to test web and other applications, CLI tools have been overlooked in this area for the most part. Today, we’ll touch on end-to-end testing of these tools, go through patterns to follow, and introduce a library to solve some of the issues we encounter along the way.