https://github.com/skx/subcommands

Easy subcommand handling for a golang based command-line application
https://github.com/skx/subcommands

cli golang library subcommands utility

Last synced: 18 days ago
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Easy subcommand handling for a golang based command-line application

• Host: GitHub
• URL: https://github.com/skx/subcommands
• Owner: skx
• License: gpl-2.0
• Created: 2019-10-30T15:49:27.000Z (about 5 years ago)
• Default Branch: master
• Last Pushed: 2022-01-01T10:19:17.000Z (almost 3 years ago)
• Last Synced: 2024-10-03T10:12:37.233Z (about 1 month ago)
• Topics: cli, golang, library, subcommands, utility
• Language: Go
• Size: 35.2 KB
• Stars: 3
• Watchers: 3
• Forks: 0
• Open Issues: 0
• Metadata Files:
  • Readme: README.md
  • Funding: .github/FUNDING.yml
  • License: LICENSE

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# subcommands

This is a simple package which allows you to write a CLI with distinct subcommands.

## Overview

Using this library you can enable your command-line application to have a number of subcommands, allowing things like this to be executed:

    $ application one

    $ application two [args]

    $ application help

In addition to allowing the user to specify a sub-command via the first argument it will also allow a default to be used if your binary has the same name as a sub-command.

For example if you had a binary named `gobox` you could create a symlink called `ls`:

    $ ln -s gobox ls

    $ ./ls

Here running `ls` is the same as running `gobox ls`, and argument parsing would work the same too:

    $ gobox ls --foo

    $ ./ls --foo

## Bash Completion

All applications using this library will find it easy to generate a bash-completion script, via the following addition to their init-file:

    $ source <(application bash-completion)

The generated completion-script will allow TAB-completion of the sub-commands, as well as their options.

## Rationale

There are several frameworks for building a simple CLI application, such as Corba.  But those are relatively heavyweight.

This is designed to implement the minimum required support:

* Allow an application to register sub-commands:

  * `foo help`

    * Show help

  * `foo version`

    * Show the version

  * `foo server`

    * Launch a HTTP-server

  * etc.

* Allow flags to be defined on a per-subcommand basis.

* Allow the sub-commands to process any remaining arguments.

* Allow trivial bash-completion scripts to be generated.

## Example

There is a simple example defined in [_example/main.go](_example/main.go).