CLI reference

1. elm-tooling init
2. elm-tooling tools
3. elm-tooling install

Note: None of the commands take any arguments.

elm-tooling init

Create a sample elm-tooling.json in the current directory. It tries to guess some values based on your project to help you get started.

elm-tooling tools

Interactively add, remove and update tools in your elm-tooling.json. This is an alternative to editing the "tools" field by hand.

Note: You need to update elm-tooling itself to get new tool versions! See Which tools are supported?

elm-tooling install

elm-tooling install does two things:

1. Makes sure the tools in the closest elm-tooling.json are available on disk. Downloads them if missing.
2. Creates links in your local ./node_modules/.bin/ folder to the downloaded tools, just like the elm, elm-format, etc, npm packages do. This allows you to run things like npx elm make src/Main.elm, and your editor and build tools will automatically find them. (The node_modules/ folder is always located next to your elm-tooling.json.)

In other words, elm-tooling install is a drop-in replacement for installing for example elm and elm-format with npm.

You can use npx to run the installed tools. For example, npx elm --help.

You can set ELM_HOME environment variable to customize where tools will be downloaded. The Elm compiler uses this variable too for where to store packages.

elm-tooling uses curl to download stuff if it exists, otherwise wget, and finally the https Node.js core module. So if you need to do any proxy stuff or something like that, you do that via the environment variables and config files that curl and wget understand. For example, curl proxy environment variables. Most systems – even Windows! – come with either curl or wget.

Similarly, tar is used to extract archives. Even Windows comes with tar these days so you shouldn’t need to install anything.

See also Quirks.