Background
I am designing a CLI for a container build tool I am making. It uses Gentoo’s Portage behind the scenes
Question
I want to give the user the ability to specify a custom package repository. The repository must have a name, URI and sync type.
custom_repo: {
uri: 'https://...',
name: 'custom',
sync_type: 'git',
}
How do I have the user represent this in the CLI? keep in mind, this is not the main input and is optional.
One way is to make this only provide-able via a config file using JSON or another structured data representation. But I want to see if theres a good way to do it in the CLI
What I am thinking of:
command --custom-repo uri='https://...',name=custom,sync_type=git --custom-repo ... [main input]
Is this the best way of doing this?
Just pass in the name of a json file as a CLI input (or default the name and act on it if present or use it if indicated [e.g. /U == use json.config]).
I will definitely make that an option, but I would still want it to be invokable via CLI only if the user chooses. It makes scripting easier sometimes.
perhaps also useful in this case to document the shortcut of
<(echo ‘{…}’)
since not many people know about it, and it makes your tool work with things specified entirely on the command line rather than temp files
alternatively —config-file and —config-json or similar
making and cleaning up temp files when writing scripts is just such a massive PITA
If the json payload is small with finite keys you can support separate args for those keys. If you really need arbitrary json what you have described is fairly reasonable as a shorthand, similar to AWS CLI shorthand.
Honestly passing optional/advanced args as json via CLI isn’t usually too bad since you can quote it with single quotes.
Can’t this all be deduced from the URI?
The .git suffix indicates git, the project name is the stem (project).
Ok, then I don’t understand at all. What happens if I host my git project on https://myawesomeproject.dev/? How can the application infer anything by this URL?
For something like that i’d take a parameter like this (repeated as necessary):
--custom-repo=<name>=<synctype>+<url>
for example:
--custom-repo=custom=git+https://github.com/matcha/custom
command --git-url https://... --alias myalias --svn-url http://... --alias mysvnalias
You may process it as a stack.
When reading within the program from stdin I recommend a state machine.
