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?
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]).
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
For something like that i’d take a parameter like this (repeated as necessary):
--custom-repo=<name>=<synctype>+<url>
for example:
--custom-repo=custom=git+https://github.com/matcha/custom
Ask the user to customize a preset.json?
command --git-url https://... --alias myalias --svn-url http://... --alias mysvnalias
You may process it as a stack.
When reading within the program from stdin I recommend a state machine.
