Your kickstart into Form prompts

• What to expect
• Example
• Define a prompt
• Transform the prompt into a Form
• Add fields
• Next steps
• Related

What to expect

Form prompts can be very helpful when building a CLI tool. A form allows the user to navigate the fields while entering and offers several helpful options.

In this guide we will show you the basic usage of a form prompt.

We will …

• … create a basic prompt.
• … transform the prompt into a form.
• … add fields to our form.

Example

Getting started example

Define a prompt

To use the form prompt we need to require {prompt} from "enquirer".
Next we can define a prompt as usual. We will start with a name input.

const { prompt } = require("enquirer");

const results = prompt({
  message: "First Name:",
  name: "firstname",
  type: "input"
});

Transform the prompt into a Form

To make a form we need to add the type: "form" and choices: string[] | Choice[] properties to our prompt configuration.

Let's add our field as the first choice, change the message: string to describe the entire form and give our form a unique name: string

const { prompt } = require("enquirer");

const results = prompt({
  choices: [{
    message: "First Name",
    name: "firstname"
  }],
  message: "Please provide the following information:",
  name: "user",
  type: "form"
});

Add fields

Now is the time to continue adding fields to our form.

Your form should now look like this.

const { prompt } = require("enquirer");

const results = prompt({
  choices: [
    {
      message: "First Name",
      name: "firstname"
    },
    {
      message: "Last Name",
      name: "lastname"
    },
    {
      message: "GitHub username",
      name: "username"
    }
  ],
  message: "Please provide the following information:",
  name: "user",
  type: "form"
});

Next steps

You should now be comfortable with basic form prompts. In the next steps we will look at some options to add some spice to our form.

• Default values

Related

• Default values