cli

Package cli is a tiny and minimalistic CLI library for Go.

Why make another one?

This package aims to reach out these goals:

To be simple as possible.
To be flexible until you not violate (1).

There are few libraries to build CLI for sure, but sometimes you don't want to spend much time on learning their philosophy. To be honest it's almost always much easier to write your own map[string]func(). This library allows you to save the time spent on writing that.

Concepts

There is a cli.Command interface which has single Run() method. You can group commands by using cli.Commands map type. Additional behaviour can be added by implementing few optional interfaces such as cli.FlagDefiner.

Limitations

There is no "persistent" or "global" flags. That is, flags are parsed exactly for command they appear after.

Implementing this is not a big deal, but it complicates library API enough. However, it's possible to "mixin" global flags into each command's flag set manually (optionally resolving cases when global flag was set twice on the path or was rewritten by env value if custom flags parsing used).

Usage

package main

import (
	"context"
	"flag"
	"time"

	"github.com/gobwas/cli"
)

func main() {
	cli.Main(cli.Commands{
		"sleep": new(sleepCommand),
	})
}

type sleepCommand struct {
	duration time.Duration
}

func (s *sleepCommand) DefineFlags(fs *flag.FlagSet) {
	fs.DurationVar(&s.duration,
		"d", s.duration,
		"how long to sleep",
	)
}

func (s *sleepCommand) Run(ctx context.Context, _ []string) error {
	select {
	case <-ctx.Done(): // SIGINT, SIGTERM or SIGQUIT received.
		return ctx.Err()
	case <-time.After(s.duration):
		return nil
	}
}

Note that context.Context instance passed to the Run() method will be cancelled by default if process receives SIGTERM, SIGINT or SIGQUIT signals. See cli.Runner and cli.DefaultRunner docs for more info.

Without help message customization, help request will output this:

$ go run ./example sleep -h
Usage:

  example sleep

Options:

  -d duration
        how long to sleep (default 1s)

However, you can implement optional cli.NameProvider and, say, cli.SynopsisProvider to make help message more specific:

func (s *sleepCommand) Name() string {
	return "Suspends execution for a given amount of time."
}

func (s *sleepCommand) Synopsis() string {
	return "[-d duration]"
}

Now the output will look like this:

$ go run ./examples/simple help sleep
Suspends execution for a given amount of time.

Usage:

  example sleep [-d duration]

Options:

  -d duration
        how long to sleep (default 1s)

Help for whole binary will look like this:

$ go run ./example help
Usage:

  example [help] <command>

Commands:
  sleep  Suspends execution for a given amount of time.

To customize the cli.Commands help output you can use cli.Container wrapper.

See the example folder for more info.