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cli

godoc coverage

A novel experience for building application entrypoint.

Features

  • POSIX & GNU style flag parsing, typed and customizable. (flag*.go)
  • Commands and sub-commands, nothing hidden. (cmd*.go)
  • Shell completions made straightforward. (comp*.go, scripts/*)
    • Use CompCmdShells to provide shell completion support for bash, zsh and pwsh (powershell).
  • From mostly static to highly dynamic, choices available for zero-allocation* and productivity preferences.
    • Choose ReflectIndexer for productivity, choose FuncIndexer for zero-allocation. (see Core Concepts and module document)
  • Solid & decoupled utilities comes with sane abstractions. (vp*.go, rules*.go)
    • VP implementations for both concrete types and reflection types.

*zero-allocation can be achieved by adding proper buffering in ParseOptions and CmdOptions.

Examples

see package examples

Known Limitations

  1. Flags having implicit value cannot be followed by value prefixed with hyphen (-) if the flag accepts that value (e.g. --IntSum -1). To workaround, choose any of following methods:

    • (Method 1) use = to assign flag value explicitly (e.g. --IntSum=-1)
    • (Method 2) set ParseOptions.HandleParseError to handle error of type *ErrAmbiguousArgs.

  2. Limitations to standalone dash (--)

    • Cannot be a flag value (e.g. given --sep --, then --sep gets nothing). To wrokaround, use = to assign dash value (e.g. --sep=--)
    • Can never be a positional arg. To workaround, check if dashArgs == nil is true, and if it is ture, then there is no standalone dash.
    • Due to limitations mentioned above, you cannot use a hyphen (-) as a flag shorthand.

Core Concepts

  • A FlagFinder implementation is capable of searching flags known to it by flag name or shorthand, so it represents a set of flags.
  • FlagIndexer extends the ability of FlagFinder with iteration support (FlagIter).
    • MapIndexer: register flags just like old days. (see Motivation)
    • FuncIndexer: provide ad-hoc flag indexing logic.
    • LevelIndexer: build flag hierarchies.
    • ReflectIndexer: lazily produce flags on request.
    • MultiIndexer: collect indexers as one.
    • ... or implement your own FlagIndexer/FlagFinder for you own use cases.
  • A root command is the receiver of a (*Cmd).Exec(...) function call.
  • A Route is a collection of all *Cmds from the root command to the target command.

Terminology

Illustration without sub-commands:

                        dash
                          |
      posArg  flag name   |
         |        |       |
$ ./foo xxx -i --join bar -- other args
            |          |    [ all args after the dash are dashArgs]
            |          |
            |      flag value
            |
 flag shorthand, with implicit value
  • args: all strings provided to a cmd.
    • For a root command in real world, it usually is os.Args[1:]
  • flags: before the first dash, strings interpreted as flag names and flag values.
    • flag (long) name: a string consists of more than one unicode characters.
    • flag shorthand: a string consists of exactly one unicode character and not a hyphen (-).
  • subcmds (sub-commands): before the first dash, ignore flag names and their values, consecutive args matching a serial of Cmd.Pattern.
    • In the above illustration, if there is a Cmd in root command's Children whose .Pattern is xxx, then the posArg xxx becomes subcmd xxx.
  • posArgs (positional args): before the first dash, strings that are not flags and subcmds.
  • dashArgs: all strings after the first dash.

Motivation

Most existing command-line libraies forces you to register your flags to some central registries to get things going, these registrations happen at runtime and often involves dynamic memory allocation, even the often highly praised Rust crate clap works this way, but under the guise of procedural macros.

While we acknowledge the fact flag registration works fine in most cases, it is obvious to us that larger applications with a fair amount of sub-commands and flags often suffer from such method due to the central builder forcing the application to write a lot of boilerplate code just to work around its own workflow and restrictions, and we definitely want something more flexible.

Hint: You may obtain (almost) the same experience of traditional flag registration from this module by using MapIndexer and predefined flag types.

The Bigger Picture - an alternative std

We are building a no-GC, zero-allocation, FFI-friendly, well-structured std module (inside primecitizens/pcz) for Golang, exposing all lower bits of the runtime, and compatible with the official go1.21+ toolchain (go tool compile/link/asm).

This cli module serves as a showcase how we redesign fundamental components in a standard library.

Roadmap

  • Completion support for fish
  • Add more Helper interfaces in addition to HelperTerminal.
    • HelperMarkdown
    • HelperMandoc
    • HelperYAML
  • Define a new interface (Command) as abstraction of Cmd to allow custom implementation.
  • Add cli tool cligen to generate flag indexer implementations for struct types.

LICENSE

Copyright 2023 The Prime Citizens

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

   http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.