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by reactordev 855 days ago
Not to dissuade or discourage but having a cli tool on top a cli tool on top a cli tool is kind of ridiculous and says a lot more about web dev these days.

Wouldn’t someone using Shadcn just use their cli and install all the things? Wouldn’t a company using Shadcn have their own git or npm of which they can install custom private packages? I’m at a loss at what exactly the value prop of this is.

3 comments

I'm not OP, but I appreciate the earnestness of your question so I'll try to answer.

I believe the answer comes from this line:

> Custom Registry Support

This is effectively the shadcn CLI, but with the ability to add custom sources of content in the form of registries. Imagine you want to add a shadcn component, a fontawesome icon, or another custom library component. Wouldn't it be nice to have it all accessible via one unified interface.

Anything that promotes more code-owning and fewer dependencies for lower level items (components, icons, etc.) is a win in my book.

Similar prior art is sly-cli: https://sly-cli.fly.dev

@OP: I'd consider renaming your project to avoid co-opting the shadcn name, though. For your benefit and for shadcn's.

“Imagine you want to add a shadcn component, a fontawesome icon, or another custom library component. Wouldn't it be nice to have it all accessible via one unified interface.”

Don’t we have that already with rollup in vite? I simply import it into my jsx and use it. Npm is that interface. I guess I just don’t understand the pain this is trying to solve. I import Shadcn components, I import fontawesome icons, or hero icons, or SVG, or whatever you want. The rollup bundles everything into my public folder ready to be content-delivered. All of this is done with vite. Sly uses vite. So again, a cli tool on top a cli tool on top a cli tool just so you don’t have to import a sheet with svg’s you probably won’t use. Reducing bundle size. Great. Abstracting it all on top of an ecosystem on top of an ecosystem? Not great. Sorry. I’ll never have a use for sly or shadxn or anything that simply abstracts the layer beneath and claim it’s innovative. Vite is doing the work.

The innovation here is not bundling, it’s owning the code in your codebase instead of relying on external packages. If you want to make changes to components, icons, etc. it is better to have the raw files and be able to change them, than have to wrap or manipulate them via other methods. That’s the difference here.

I want my own button component, not one that requires upgrades, changes, or a million hidden deps.

Thank you not at all. Ok, this is not cli that build on top of a cli. Its an cli that adapts to your specific need. So you don't need a new cli, you only need a registry. a url from where your provision your custom components
More than what?