Vue CLI and Installation

Vue CLI

The average client-side JavaScript project will utilize a range of build tools, including transpilers, linters, minifiers, and module bundlers. Each tool has its configuration options that often need to be set in a certain way to play nicely with the other tools in the chain.

Several boilerplate projects have sprung up to facilitate setting up new apps by providing a preconfigured starting point that we can build on rather than starting from scratch. These can work out well if we’re able to find a boilerplate project that includes the set of tools we want to use.

Vue CLI (command-line interface) is a terminal-based tool that aims to solve this problem in a different way, allowing us to create new projects by selecting preset combinations, or picking and choosing the build tools we want and having the CLI install and configure them for us.

Installing the CLI

Installing the CLI tool is very straightforward, and you probably won’t be surprised to learn that it’s done via npm. We’ll be using version 4.5, the current version at the time of writing. It’s installed with the following command: