Conjure your asana tasks straight onto your terminal window

Project management tools like asana can be pretty noisy. Especially if you're not maintaining them every day. I encountered this problem and was looking for an alternative way to get my relevant information. An approach that didn't require me to actively click through the asana interface every day, just to keep up with the latest outstanding tasks.

My idea was to get the most relevant asana tasks onto my screen with a single command. This way I can decide regularly if I tackle a task or postpone it until I finished a more prominent issue.

node.js CLI with oclif

Disclaimer: In hindsight oclif was completely overpowered for this project and this could've easily been done with a simple node script. I'm planning to extend this CLI so that kind of justifies it.

🏷 Oclif offers a framework that does the heavy lifting when it comes to CLI features like:

• generating the project structure
• argument parsing
• out of the box typescript support
• and more...

I've generated the project structure with npx oclif generate asana-cli and after going through the interactive generator process I've ended up with a fully scaffolded cli

Interactive generator asks a couple of questions

The generated cli project structure

After this step I ran npx oclif generate command tasks inside the project path to generate a starter template for my first command. It created a new file in /src/commands/tasks.ts. The command is called "tasks" because it fetches the most relevant tasks from asana.

Fetching the tasks from asana

First we install all required dependencies. run npm install asana luxon @types/luxon @types/asana asana contains the node client to interact with the asana REST API. We will use the date time library luxon to compare and format dates.

After important all dependencies we create an instance of the asana client and pass in our personal access token from asana as an argument. For security reasons the Token is not passed in as a string but as an environment variable. This environment variable (ASANA_ACCESS_TOKEN) needs to be accessible to the code when the CLI is executing.

Then I fetched the relevant asana tasks inside of /src/commands/tasks.ts based on an example from their docs and filtered them so I only get the ones that are due today or in up to 4 days.

During development, you can build and run the cli with:

npm run build to compile the typescript code and generate a new

ASANA_ACCESS_TOKEN=1/12123123123123:fi2rfklaf2ofaj3iofalfj314 ./bin/run tasks to run the tasks command

If you want to try out the CLI inside the replit, then you need to fork it and add your own ASANA_ACCESS_TOKEN in the "Secrets (Environment Variables)" tab of your forked replit.

"Secrets (Environment Variables)" tab of a replit