Introducing jsreport-cli

Let's welcome jsreport-cli, a new extension and utility that we know you will find very useful which is available from jsreport 1.5, jsreport-cli is a CLI for jsreport, which have very useful commands that will speed up the way how you interact with jsreport.

A new way to get started

Our previous steps to get started with jsreport were:

npm install jsreport
node node_modules/jsreport --init
npm start

Now, with the CLI these are the new steps:

npm install -g jsreport-cli
jsreport init
jsreport start

The previous steps are still working, but we recommend the usage of the CLI from now on for the best experience.

Note that you only need to npm install -g jsreport-cli one time per machine, after that you will have the global jsreport command in your machine which you can use in any directory, everywhere.

Generate jsreport configuration

After installing jsreport you probably need to tweak the configuration of jsreport to meet your needs, but doing this task manually can be a little tedious at first, fortunately the CLI has a command configure to help you on this task, you will be asked some questions and based on the responses a configuration file will be created.

Installing jsreport as windows service

For windows users we have always had a way to install their jsreport apps as windows services, this functionality is part of the CLI too through the usage of win-install and win-uninstall commands.

The previous way to install/uninstall windows services was using node node_modules/jsreport --install and node node_modules/jsreport --uninstall, this way is still working, so you don't need to worry about breaking something.

Rendering reports directly from the CLI

the CLI has a very handy command, render, which you can use to render some reports directly from your console, this command has the ability to render local templates, local templates using a background process (for the best performance), and even remote templates (connecting to a remote jsreport server).

We are very excited for the release of this new extension and for what comes next, you can find all relevant documentation for the CLI here.

As always let us know what you think about this new feature or if you have some feedback about it.