Originally Published: March 2017

CJ is a command line utility I built to make it quicker for me to run common commands. You can download it as an NPM module: cj-cmd. The utlity acts as a wrapper around many existing libraries, so it is normally the only global plugin I would ever install on a development machine. When installed globally you can then use it by running e.g: cj install react-js Here's a run down of the commands so far:

• install — Wrapper around Yeoman so that I can install any Yeoman templates that are dependencies of the cj module. The main benefit of this is that you do not have to install each generator/template manually first, as they are all bundled within this utility.
• run — A wrapper around global-commands, another one of my npm modules that lets you run common commands from any directory, so you don’t need to “cd” to some potential long and hard to remember directory first
• update — A command that will update all the node packages in the file you run it from. This will always update to the latest version rather than respecting the specified semver number.
• update — self — Is an option that can be passed to update the cj-cmd module.

At some point I’m looking to add system checks into this plugin so that it will download/install or tell you what your system needs in order to run various projects. This will help me maintain a consistent development environment and stop forgetting which Atom plugins I have installed at work but not on my home machine yet. This type of utility is super handy and can be adapted for organisations to use, in order to let your developers all share the same template generators, linting guides etc.