To get an architecture overview of Apache Cordova and how it works and how all its many libraries are connected, it makes sense to follow the journey a typical user of Cordova would take:
$ npm install -g cordovaThe installation instructions tell the user run npm install -g cordova. This installs the cordova npm package, which is the published version of the code in the apache/cordova-cli repository.
The user then can run commands like cordova -v in their command line, which executes the bin/cordova program (or bin/cordova.cmd on Windows, which just executes bin/cordova with node) that is installed in the global npm packages directory.
When installing cordova-cli, the user also installed two other Cordova libraries via the dependencies in package.json (next to several other, external libraries) : cordova-common and cordova-lib.
cordova-cli itself is a pretty thin layer of code that handles parsing and redirecting the commands the CLI can execute over to cordova-lib. Besides, it handles outputting the help commands and prompting for permission and sending telemetry data. From cordova-common is uses mainly the logger and some error handling.
cordova-common contains what it says with its name: Common functionality that is used by other Cordova libraries like cordova-cli or cordova-lib and others. It has no further Cordova library dependencies.
cordova-lib on the other hand is the heart of the Cordova CLI: Most commands executed with cordova-cli are then actually handled by cordova-lib. For that it has dependencies on the rest of the Cordova tooling libraries: cordova-common (again), cordova-create, cordova-fetch, cordova-serve and cordova-js.
To understand how those are used, it is best to look at some Cordova CLI command the user will execute:
$ cordova createIf they don't have a project via Git or download, they will run cordova create to create a new Cordova project.
TODO
$ cordova info$ cordova platform add ...Adds platform pinned versions
contains default plugins
$ cordova plugin add ...manually add plugins
$ cordova serve$ cordova prepare/compile/clean/run(/emulate/build) ...CLI command to run/emulate/build platform
$ cordova requirements