buncli

What it is

buncli is a ready-to-fork template for building CLI tools in TypeScript. It combines three things that work well together:

• Commander for parsing commands, options, and arguments with built-in help text
• @inquirer/prompts for interactive input: text, select lists, confirmations, checkboxes, password fields, searchable lists, and more
• Bun as the runtime, bundler, package manager, and compiler

Clone the repo, install with bun install, and you have a working CLI with a sample greet command. Add your own commands in minutes.

Why Bun

Bun is a compelling choice for CLI tools for several reasons:

• TypeScript without a build step. Bun runs .ts files directly. No tsc, no ts-node, no bundler config. Write TypeScript and run it.
• Bun Shell. Import $ from bun and run shell commands with tagged template literals. No child_process, no execa, no callback gymnastics.
• Fast startup. CLI tools need to feel instant. Bun's startup time is significantly faster than Node, which matters when your tool runs dozens of times a day.
• Built-in file I/O. Bun.file() and Bun.write() replace fs.readFile and fs.writeFile with a cleaner API. JSON parsing is one method call.
• Standalone binaries. bun build --compile produces a single executable that embeds the Bun runtime. No Node, no Bun, no node_modules on the target machine. Download it, chmod +x, run it.
• Cross-compilation. Build for Linux, macOS, and Windows from any platform with --target=bun-{linux,darwin,windows}-{x64,arm64}.
• Auto-loaded .env files. Environment variables from .env are available on process.env without dotenv or any config.

Use cases

A shared internal CLI is one of the fastest ways to bring consistency to a fragmented team:

• Standardized project scaffolding. Prompt developers through required setup steps so every new project starts from the same baseline.
• Guided deployment workflows. Walk engineers through pre-flight checks, environment selection, and confirmation steps before pushing to production.
• Environment and service status checks. Poll endpoints, database connections, and third-party integrations to surface issues before they become support tickets.
• Onboarding automation. New hire runs one command and gets their local environment configured: dependencies installed, .env files populated, seed data loaded.
• Incident response runbooks. Encode the steps engineers take during an outage into a guided interactive script so the playbook is actually followed under pressure.
• Secrets and credential rotation. Walk through rotating API keys across services with confirmation prompts and validation that new credentials work before old ones are revoked.
• Automated release notes. Pull merged PRs and commit history since the last tag, format them into a changelog, consistently, every time.
• Internal data lookups. Query internal APIs or databases by record ID, customer name, or date range without digging through five dashboards.
• Audit and compliance reporting. Generate point-in-time snapshots of user access, configuration state, or data exports in a consistent format.

Getting started

# Clone and install
git clone https://github.com/sethdavis512/buncli.git mycli
cd mycli
bun install

# Run in development
bun run index.ts greet

# Compile to a standalone binary
bun build --compile --minify --bytecode ./index.ts --outfile mycli
./mycli greet