Node.js Simple Command Line Confirm Messages

Sometime, special terminal commands can be dangerous for your users. To ensure that they are really want to run the command the proven “best practise” is to wait for an explicit user confirmation by typing yes/no into the terminal.

Install “prompt” using NPM#

First of all, you have to install prompt – a powerfull package for command line prompts & user interactions. The “–save” option will add this package to your package.json file.

npm install prompt --save

Confirm Dialog#

After installing the prompt package you can use the following code to show a confirm dialog to your users.

var _prompt = require('prompt');

// user confirmation required!
_prompt.start();

// disable prefix message & colors
_prompt.message = '';
_prompt.delimiter = '';
_prompt.colors = false;

// wait for user confirmation
_prompt.get({
    properties: {
        
        // setup the dialog
        confirm: {
            // allow yes, no, y, n, YES, NO, Y, N as answer
            pattern: /^(yes|no|y|n)$/gi,
            description: 'Do you really want to format the filesystem and delete all file ?',
            message: 'Type yes/no',
            required: true,
            default: 'no'
        }
    }
}, function (err, result){
    // transform to lower case
    var c = result.confirm.toLowerCase();

    // yes or y typed ? otherwise abort
    if (c!='y' && c!='yes'){
        console.log('ABORT');
        return;
    }
    
    // your code
    console.log('Action confirmed');
    
});