Programming

17510 readers

6 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

snowe

Ategon

[email protected]

In CLI design, how to ask the user for a nested structured input? (lemy.lol)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/programming

24 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] chris 17 points 10 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 10 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 10 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 10 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 10 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