this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
32 points (94.4% liked)

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

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]
32
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
[–] oscar 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

But you can't assume that it follows the github format of https://<domain>/<user>/<project>.git. In my example, I meant that you would just use that url to clone it:

git clone https://myawesomeproject.dev

One real-world example of this is ziglings.org (though it's technically just a redirect).

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

That's not a GitHub format; it's a git format.

[–] oscar 3 points 10 months ago

No, it isn't. Git doesn't care what the url is, as long as it uses a supported transport protocol.