# shipping the namescout cli

the namescout homepage already had a terminal demo in the hero. small black window, $ npx namescout-cli redis, output streaming down. except: there was no cli. it was a mock-up. fixing the mismatch (building a real cli that does exactly what the demo promises) was today’s work, alongside a sweep through the homepage itself.

the cli

zero dependencies, node 18+ stdlib only, hits the public /api/v1/check and /api/v1/suggest endpoints. the whole thing is three files under bin/ and lib/:

npx namescout-cli redis

NameScout · checking "redis" (developer-tool)

Score  11 / 100   Name collision risk

DOMAINS
  ✗  redis.com  taken
  ✓  redis.dev  available
  ...

--mode, --suggest, --json, --no-color flags. respects NO_COLOR env var. NAMESCOUT_API env var to point at a self-hosted instance. the help output and the readme are the entire docs.

the name

the obvious npm slot, namescout, was already taken when i went to publish. not by a squatter; by someone else who’d shipped a real tool under the same name a few days earlier. no story to tell there. shipped as namescout-cli instead and added a second bin alias in package.json so both invocations resolve to the same script:

"bin": {
  "namescout": "bin/namescout.js",
  "namescout-cli": "bin/namescout.js"
}

npx namescout-cli works. globally installed, namescout <name> also works. the two-bin trick is cheap insurance against npx’s bin-resolution behavior shifting between npm versions.

the cli lives in its own public repo. the main namescout app stays private for now, but devs (rightly) don’t trust closed-source clis that hit remote apis. splitting the cli out was the single biggest credibility move i could make today.

homepage polish

while the cli was building, swept the homepage:

• three report views collapsed into one. the page was rendering the same data three different ways (header card, registry breakdown, terminal-styled report). pick the best one, delete the other two. nav anchors retitled styles / sample report / providers → search / report / providers. the old labels were internal jargon
• inline cli demo in the hero. the terminal block i described earlier used to be a separate banner farther down the page. moved it inline below the search form so the cli pitch lands the moment someone reads the value prop, not after a scroll
• score help popover. clicking the ? next to the score now opens a small panel explaining the 0–100 scale, the verdict-band cutoffs, and how mode weighting affects the result. plain <button> + <dialog>, no library, closes on outside-click or escape
• fixed a suspense + hash anchor bug. the “suggest alternative names” toggle used <a href="#suggestions"> to swap a query param. that broke because the streamed suspense boundaries change layout heights as they resolve, so the browser was scrolling to a position that no longer existed. fix: a client component using router.replace(url, { scroll: false }). no hash, no jump

what’s next

• monetize: an affiliate link out to a registrar when a domain comes up available, and a $5/mo “watch” feature that pings you when a key namespace changes (a .dev opens up, an npm package is unpublished)
• open-source the main repo once the watch feature ships, so the launch carries both stories

the cli is the thing the homepage was already promising. publishing it closes the credibility gap between “this is what the tool looks like” and “this is what the tool actually is.”