A collection of common interactive command line user interfaces.

Give it a try in your own terminal!

npx @inquirer/demo@latest

npm install @inquirer/prompts

yarn add @inquirer/prompts

import { input } from '@inquirer/prompts';

const answer = await input({ message: 'Enter your name' });

import { input } from '@inquirer/prompts';

See documentation for usage example and options documentation.

import { select } from '@inquirer/prompts';

See documentation for usage example and options documentation.

import { checkbox } from '@inquirer/prompts';

See documentation for usage example and options documentation.

import { confirm } from '@inquirer/prompts';

See documentation for usage example and options documentation.

import { search } from '@inquirer/prompts';

See documentation for usage example and options documentation.

import { password } from '@inquirer/prompts';

See documentation for usage example and options documentation.

import { expand } from '@inquirer/prompts';

See documentation for usage example and options documentation.

Launches an instance of the users preferred editor on a temporary file. Once the user exits their editor, the content of the temporary file is read as the answer. The editor used is determined by reading the $VISUAL or $EDITOR environment variables. If neither of those are present, the OS default is used (notepad on Windows, vim on Mac or Linux.)

import { editor } from '@inquirer/prompts';

See documentation for usage example and options documentation.

Very similar to the input prompt, but with built-in number validation configuration option.

import { number } from '@inquirer/prompts';

See documentation for usage example and options documentation.

import { rawlist } from '@inquirer/prompts';

See documentation for usage example and options documentation.

The API documentation is over here, and our testing utilities here.

All inquirer prompts are a function taking 2 arguments. The first argument is the prompt configuration (unique to each prompt). The second is providing contextual or runtime configuration.

The context options are:

Example:

import { confirm } from '@inquirer/prompts';

const allowEmail = await confirm(
  { message: 'Do you allow us to send you email?' },
  {
    output: new Stream.Writable({
      write(chunk, _encoding, next) {
        // Do something
        next();
      },
    }),
    clearPromptOnDone: true,
  },
);

This can preferably be done with either an AbortController or AbortSignal.

// Example 1: using built-in AbortSignal utilities
import { confirm } from '@inquirer/prompts';

const answer = await confirm({ ... }, { signal: AbortSignal.timeout(5000) });

// Example 1: implementing custom cancellation logic
import { confirm } from '@inquirer/prompts';

const controller = new AbortController();
setTimeout(() => {
  controller.abort(); // This will reject the promise
}, 5000);

const answer = await confirm({ ... }, { signal: controller.signal });

Alternatively, all prompt functions are returning a cancelable promise. This special promise type has a cancel method that'll cancel and cleanup the prompt.

On calling cancel, the answer promise will become rejected.

import { confirm } from '@inquirer/prompts';

const promise = confirm(...); // Warning: for this pattern to work, `await` cannot be used.

promise.cancel();

When a user press ctrl+c to exit a prompt, Inquirer rejects the prompt promise. This is the expected behavior in order to allow your program to teardown/cleanup its environment. When using async/await, rejected promises throw their error. When unhandled, those errors print their stack trace in your user's terminal.

ExitPromptError: User force closed the prompt with 0 null
  at file://example/packages/core/dist/esm/lib/create-prompt.js:55:20
  at Emitter.emit (file://example/node_modules/signal-exit/dist/mjs/index.js:67:19)
  at #processEmit (file://example/node_modules/signal-exit/dist/mjs/index.js:236:27)
  at #process.emit (file://example/node_modules/signal-exit/dist/mjs/index.js:187:37)
  at process.callbackTrampoline (node:internal/async_hooks:130:17)

This isn't a great UX, which is why we highly recommend you to handle those errors gracefully.

First option is to wrap your scripts in try/catch; like we do in our demo program. Or handle the error in your CLI framework mechanism; for example Clipanion catch method.

Lastly, you could handle the error globally with an event listener and silence it.

process.on('uncaughtException', (error) => {
  if (error instanceof Error && error.name === 'ExitPromptError') {
    console.log('👋 until next time!');
  } else {
    // Rethrow unknown errors
    throw error;
  }
});

When asking many questions, you might not want to keep one variable per answer everywhere. In which case, you can put the answer inside an object.

import { input, confirm } from '@inquirer/prompts';

const answers = {
  firstName: await input({ message: "What's your first name?" }),
  allowEmail: await confirm({ message: 'Do you allow us to send you email?' }),
};

console.log(answers.firstName);

Maybe some questions depend on some other question's answer.

import { input, confirm } from '@inquirer/prompts';

const allowEmail = await confirm({ message: 'Do you allow us to send you email?' });

let email;
if (allowEmail) {
  email = await input({ message: 'What is your email address' });
}

import { input } from '@inquirer/prompts';

const answer = await input(
  { message: 'Enter a value (timing out in 5 seconds)' },
  { signal: AbortSignal.timeout(5000) },
).catch((error) => {
  if (error.name === 'AbortPromptError') {
    return 'Default value';
  }

  throw error;
});

By default scripts ran from tools like husky/lint-staged might not run inside an interactive shell. In non-interactive shell, Inquirer cannot run, and users cannot send keypress events to the process.

For it to work, you must make sure you start a tty (or "interactive" input stream.)

If those scripts are set within your package.json, you can define the stream like so:

  "precommit": "my-script < /dev/tty"

Or if in a shell script file, you'll do it like so: (on Windows that's likely your only option)

#!/bin/sh
exec < /dev/tty

node my-script.js

When using inquirer prompts with nodemon, you need to pass the --no-stdin flag for everything to work as expected.

npx nodemon ./packages/demo/demos/password.mjs --no-stdin

Note that for most of you, you'll be able to use the new watch-mode built-in Node. This mode works out of the box with inquirer.

# One of depending on your need
node --watch script.js
node --watch-path=packages/ packages/demo/

Maybe some question configuration require to await a value.

import { confirm } from '@inquirer/prompts';

const answer = await confirm({ message: await getMessage() });

If you created a cool prompt, send us a PR adding it to the list below!

Interactive List Prompt
Select a choice either with arrow keys + Enter or by pressing a key associated with a choice.

? Choose an option:
>   Run command (D)
    Quit (Q)

Action Select Prompt
Choose an item from a list and choose an action to take by pressing a key.

? Choose a file Open <O> Edit <E> Delete <X>
❯ image.png
  audio.mp3
  code.py

Table Multiple Prompt
Select multiple answer from a table display.

Choose between choices? (Press <space> to select, <Up and Down> to move rows,
<Left and Right> to move columns)

┌──────────┬───────┬───────┐
│ 1-2 of 2 │ Yes?  │ No?   |
├──────────┼───────┼───────┤
│ Choice 1 │ [ ◯ ] │   ◯   |
├──────────┼───────┼───────┤
│ Choice 2 │   ◯   │   ◯   |
└──────────┴───────┴───────┘

Toggle Prompt
Confirm with a toggle. Select a choice with arrow keys + Enter.

? Do you want to continue? no / yes

Sortable Checkbox Prompt
The same as built-in checkbox prompt, but also allowing to reorder choices using ctrl+up/down.

? Which PRs and in what order would you like to merge? (Press <space> to select, <a> to toggle all, <i> to invert selection, <ctrl+up> to move item up, <ctrl+down> to move item down, and <enter> to proceed)
❯ ◯ PR 1
  ◯ PR 2
  ◯ PR 3

Multi Select Prompt

An inquirer select that supports multiple selections and filtering/searching.

? Choose your OS, IDE, PL, etc. (Press <tab> to select/deselect, <backspace> to remove selected
option, <enter> to select option)
>>  vue
>[ ] vue
 [ ] vuejs
 [ ] fuelphp
 [ ] venv
 [ ] vercel
 (Use arrow keys to reveal more options)

File Selector Prompt
A file selector, you can navigate freely between directories, choose what type of files you want to allow and it is fully customizable.

? Select a file:
/main/path/
├── folder1/
├── folder2/
├── folder3/
├── file1.txt
├── file2.pdf
└── file3.jpg (not allowed)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Use ↑↓ to navigate through the list
Press <esc> to navigate to the parent directory
Press <enter> to select a file or navigate to a directory

Copyright (c) 2023 Simon Boudrias (twitter: @vaxilart)
Licensed under the MIT license.