Some Ideas CLI could benefit from

[Souvikns]

1. A GitHub Action to install CLI.

Rather to support all the functions individually that the CLI will support in the future what we do is create an action that installs the CLI in the workflow and then users can use it to build custom workflow as they desire. So as to speak this action would be a CLI installer that could be used for any project as Node.JS, Java, GO.

Consider some examples for the action that might look

steps:
  - uses: actions/checkout@v2
  - name: Install AsyncAPI CLI 
     uses: asyncapi/install-asyncapi-cli@v1
     with:
       version: latest

Example of validating a spec file after installing the CLI

steps:
  - uses: actions/checkout@v2
  - name: Install AsyncAPI CLI 
    uses: asyncapi/install-asyncapi-cli@v1
    with:
      version: latest
  - name: validate specfile
    run: >
      asyncapi validate ./spec.yml

2. An online playground for the CLI where anyone can hop into and learn to use the CLI.

This could help potential new users to play around with the CLI commands and check them out before actually installing the CLI tool in their system, Or we can create a tutorial with basically helps the users to learn to use the CLI effectively.
For this, I was playing around with repl and It allows to share a complete codebase with files and runtime to users, maybe we can use it.

[derberg]

Now sure what is the benefit. Users can already do it on their own. Look how I did it to get ajv library available in my workflow -> https://github.com/asyncapi/community/blob/master/.github/workflows/validate-tsc-members.yml#L18

so anybody can now do:

- run: npm install @asyncapi/[email protected]

and then use cli in next workflow steps.

Have a look at this action that we have here -> https://github.com/asyncapi/github-action-for-generator. I believe this is the way to go further with GH actions once we have all on the CLI level. We either have one big GitHub Action called AsyncAPI Automation or action per command, and lots of stuff exposed on with level.

Why?
Anybody could just do:

- run: npm install @asyncapi/[email protected]

and call CLI from the next steps. The thing is that it is not common knowledge. Seems obvious but isn't really, and people prefer to always use action with a bunch of configuration options instead of doing stuff manually.

[Souvikns]

Yeah, I thought that but then I saw this exits.
One question though can any runtime which is not using actions/setup-node@v1 access npm.

[derberg]

Yeah, I thought that but then I saw this exits.

This is something we can do if we see others do it and it is popular 😄
With GitHub actions it works this way that you go to a library of all actions and you just put a search query to find an action. You search for what you need and scan results mainly for titles. So if you want to validate asyncapi, you will most likely be interested in action AsyncAPI Validator as this is to the point, and you do not care what is running behind the scenes, CLI or something else, you just trust it is a dedicated action that will always do that one thing that you need and you do not need to learn how AsyncAPI CLI works.

One question though can any runtime which is not using actions/setup-node@v1 access npm.

I'm pretty sure not, so yeah, you found a good use case for cli installation action 😄

[derberg]

should continue in asyncapi/github-action-for-cli#281