Prompts

If you only need to prompt for one specific thing, then Enquirer probably isn't needed. Instead, you should use one of the individual prompts. Enquirer is useful for when your application needs to expose multiple prompt types, or you need to compose more sophisticated prompts.

Discovering prompts

You can find prompts created by the Enquirer core team or the community on npm (https://www.npmjs.com/browse/keyword/{{@site.name}}).

Authoring prompts

Why create a prompt for {{@site.name}}?

Custom prompts are easy to write, and can be used to:

• override or extend existing functionality or default behavior of [prompt-base][]
• change how options are handled
• customize the prompt message, rendering, colors, pointer, symbols, hints, error messages and any other aspect of the prompt experience

Learn the basics

Before moving on to authoring prompts, it might help to understand how the prompts work:

• Learn about prompts, and how they work (prompt-base, etc)
• Learn about {{titleize @site.name}} core concepts
• Learn how the {{titleize @site.name}} code base is organized, and why.
• Learn about the Enquirer API
• Learn about debugging

Writing your first prompt

All prompts inherit from [prompt-base][], which is a constructor function that must be called with a question string or object.

Example

var Prompt = require('prompt-base');

function CustomPrompt() {
  Prompt.apply(this, arguments);
}

Prompt.extend(CustomPrompt);

(The Prompt.extend() method is similar to util.inherits(), but it ensures that all properties are inherited and will be invoked in the correct context, including getters and setters)

Usage example

Once published, users will be able to use your prompt like this:

var Prompt = require('prompt-awesome');

var prompt = new Prompt({
  name: 'fun',
  message: 'Having fun yet?!'
});

prompt.run()
  .then(function(answer) {
    console.log(answer);
    //=> 'of course!'
  })

Publishing your prompt

Make your prompt discoverable

If you author a custom prompt, be sure to add {{@site.name}} and {{@site.name}}-prompt to the keywords array in your project's package.json.

Publish

When you're ready to publish your prompt to npm, you can do so with the following command from the root of the project:

$ npm publish

Next steps

Now that you've published your custom prompt, let's tell the world about the great work you've done!

• To make your project as discoverable as possible, please add the keywords {{@site.name}} and {{@site.name}}-prompt to package.json.
• Tweet about it, and be sure to mention @{{@site.name}}js or use the #{{@site.name}}js hashtag (don't forget the js part on twitter)
• Show your love by starring {{@site.name}}
• Get implementation help on StackOverflow (as with twitter, please use the {{@site.name}}js tag in questions)
• TODO Gitter Discuss {{@site.name}} with us on Gitter