this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
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Programming

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In CLI design, how to ask the user for a nested structured input? (lemy.lol)
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/programming
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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?

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[–] chris 17 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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]).

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] bobbykjack 5 points 11 months ago

How about a command-line flag to name an input file, but also process input as JSON, so someone can pipe it to your command or hand-write it if they're crazy?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

Yea, as a user I'd second the use of a configuration file - that approach tends to be much more convenient to use... especially since most users won't often change these values.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

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