Fractal CLI Tool

The Fractal CLI tool is an optional, globally-installed NPM package that provides some useful commands for working with Fractal projects.

Installation & setup

The Fractal CLI tool can be installed globally via NPM:

npm i -g @frctl/fractal

To use the CLI tool with your Fractal project, you must first make sure you have a project settings file (typically called fractal.config.js) in the root of your project directory. This file should export a configured Fractal instance. For example:

// fractal.config.js

var fractal = require('@frctl/fractal').create();
fractal.set('project.title', 'FooCorp Component Library');
fractal.components.set('path', __dirname + '/src/components');

module.exports = fractal; // export the configured Fractal instance for use by the CLI tool.

Running commands

Commands are run from the command line, and typically take the format:

fractal <command-name> [args] [opts]

For example, to start the web UI dev server using the BrowserSync option, you can use the command:

fractal start --sync

When running commands in this format, the command will run and then immediately exit (unless it is watching or running a server in the background).

TIP

Fractal also provides a more immersive interactive mode that makes running multiple commands easier and faster.

Command types

The Fractal CLI supports two different types of command - global and project-level commands.

Global commands

Global commands can be run from anywhere outside of a project folder. An example of a global command is the fractal new <project-name> command which helps you quickly create a new Fractal project file structure.

Project commands

Project-level commands must be run from within the root directory of your project, and require the presence of a project settings file in the root of the project directory.

An example of a project-level command would be the fractal start command that starts up the project settings file for the web UI.