The journey of Nuxt CLI Generations

[pi0]

I was curious to look back and see what happened with Nuxt CLI along the way. Here is an output of my quick research (please comment if i missed something!)

First Generation

Almost 6 years ago, Nuxt v0.2.0 made by great @atinux with 3 commands nuxt, nuxt-init, and nuxt-start implementation (source). Tracking up to latest 0.x (v0.10.7) still using plain simple process.argv and now with more commands and options (source). At some point in the long tail of 1.0.0 RC releases, we migrated to use minimist (nuxt/nuxt@602adf0).

Second Generation

Since Nuxt 2, we have integrated CLI with consola (nuxt/nuxt@59ff0df) and webpackbar to supercharge the CLI experience.

Starting with v2.3.0 version of Nuxt, we made a significant refactor converting Nuxt into monorepo architecture (nuxt/nuxt#4051 (comment)), the first time introducing @nuxtjs/cli (which was still a dependency of Nuxt)

At the same time, amazing @clarkdo worked on create-nuxt-app CLI to make a scaffolding wizard cli.

Third Generation

A few months before working on Nuxt 3 initially work, I and @atinux started to discuss a better version of CLI, starting with nuxt/cli-draft, talking about so wanted features such as global CLI, module management, scaffolding, linking, testing, etc.

With all the amazing ideas about nuxi-cli, we needed a minimal CLI implementation to allow us to develop Nuxt 3 and "nuxi" (Nuxt Interface) was introduced into the core. It is a zero-dependency package, that is designed to work globally without direct dependency on Nuxt. Built with MRI and it has support for built-in project init replacing create-nuxt-app

Today

Today, we are still supporting Nuxt 2 / CNA CLIs, Nuxt 3 being powered by minimal, yet powerful Nuxi and we also have few of more CLI islands for building modules, telemetry, and dev tools,... implemented on their own.

And we know A LOT about how to make an elegant CLI experience and what is needed to achieve it.

And Tomorrow...

Hope we can continue the journey of making the best CLI experience in the world with Nuxt!

Check out the Vision Discussion to learn more about what is upcoming!