magic-cli
A foundation for building your own suite of command line tools.
magic-cli exists to make it easy to create a set of tools that work together. It's not a tool you use as-is; it's here to offer a starting point for your own custom command line tools.
Learn more about the origins of magic-cli in The Joy of Internal Tools, a post on the Slack Engineering blog.
Customization
Rename the magic-cli
script to whatever you want — for example, if you happen to work for example.com, you might rename it to example
. (If you want to keep any of the example commands that come with it, rename them to have that new name as a prefix — for example, rename magic-cli-update
to example-update
.)
Now, when you run example
, it will look for executables in the same directory as itself which have filenames that begin with example-
. If there's an executable called example-build
, you could run it by typing example build
.
Now, when you type example
, you'll see example build
in the list of supported subcommands. For extra credit, you can add a human-readable description in that list by putting a comment immediately under the #!
line:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
# This line will be shown in the list of commands.
Installation
This repository includes a Makefile that will install magic-cli
and all of its subcommands into /usr/local/bin
:
$ make install
You can also use it to uninstall magic-cli
:
$ make uninstall
If you rename magic-cli to something different, change the value of PREFIX
in the Makefile.
Updates
An example script for updating the tools is also included; it makes installing the latest tools into a single step process:
$ magic-cli update
Updated tools to 01ec2ef (2016-03-30 16:20:30 -0700)
magic-cli-update
provides a starting point for you to use for your own updater. If you're hosting your tools in a git repository, customizing this script just entails modifying the SOURCE_REPO
constant at the top of the file. If your needs are more complex, you can replace the fetch_latest_code!
and get_version_info
methods.