I’ve been maintaining rust-starter[!] for quite sometime now. It is kind of the equivalent of fang but for Rust. It uses Clap which is the equivalent of Cobra; though I don’t think Clap has the same kind of fancy output?
Throughout these years, I have found that cross-compiling is the most challenging part of creating a CLI. When you are building a web back-end, you control the execution environment (usually linux). For CLIs, your users could be on Linux, macOS or Windows. You need to get three x2 binaries (so a total of 6) to have a fair coverage.
I’ve tried cross, but for Windows and macOS you need licenses. There is no straightforward way to give your users Docker images and have them running in a few commands. You can compile on GitHub action machines, but that’s a very slow feedback loop. I wonder if things are better in Go land.
I feel your pain. That said, cross compiling from Go is pretty trivial, as long as everything is pure Go, which it most often is. That’s one if the reasons we invested in jt.
(Hello from Charm! I’m one of the authors of this library.)
Golang itself bundles a toolchain and can cross compile to a many target OSes and architectures. I use Goreleaser [1] to create GitHub releases, Homebrew packages, Docker images, and Linux packages. Goreleaser Pro can also create MSI packages.
ETA since I just saw Christian chime in: the Goreleaser author works at Charm.sh =)
This is great, lots I learned by looking at your code and the dependencies you use!
I started a similar thing, although not as feature-rich as yours. My goal was to follow CLI best practices and add all the boilerplate one needs to build a Rust CLI.
Wow TIL cross compilation is a bit of a pain in Rust. I assumed it was as easy as Go. I can confirm as long as you're using pure Go (no cgo), it's as easy as setting $GOOS and $GOARCH appropriately.
I looked into how rust does does it for rustup, and they have a pretty amazing set of gh actions to build for their architectures, I can't find the GH link now tho
Just re-wrote an internal CLI to urfave from custom, but having issues with v3 autocomplete scripts. Might just take the time to switch over to cobra and use this.
Stubborn complaint (and maybe a hot take): I dislike CLIs that try to be overly pretty. I don't receive any tangible benefit as the user from the "fancy" (their words) help output. I'd much rather simple plain text output that looks like all the other tools I already use.
A lot of the fancy CLIs I use have a `--json` option that gives the user the chance to pipe output to eg jq and process it there. I find that a good alternative to running stuff through cut, sed or awk before processing.
Alignment (and maybe bold text for some things) is all you need in >95% of cases, IMHO.
One of the downsides of a lot of these tools is that's exactly what they don't do well: many things don't align or wrap nicely.
For example, here's a comparison of this fang library vs one where I just raw-dogged the usage text: https://imgur.com/a/QWh9TLD – the nice alignment does a lot more than colours. Especially for larger programs with a bunch of flags it can be such a pain. For example from an otherwise quite nice tool: https://imgur.com/a/RELL9Gk – you just completely lose any "overview".
I did spend some time on some better tooling to improve all of this, because manually writing these isn't super-fun either, but not so straight-forward to do well (or at least: not in a way that I like).
> One of the downsides of a lot of these tools is that's exactly what they don't do well: many things don't align or wrap nicely.
Bling is easy. Unsexy usability details are hard.
Z$ time ./example/run
You ran the root command. Now try --help.
./example/run 0.13s user 0.27s system 177% cpu 0.228 total
Why would an example program take 228ms?
Z$ ./example/run --name='abc def'
Unknown command "def" for "example".
Try --help for usage.
Huh? 'abc def' is one shell word. --name=abc works fine.
Z$ ./example/run --name ''
ERROR
Flag needs an argument: --name.
Try --help for usage.
But I did give it an argument: the empty string.
And why is the output indented two columns from the left margin anyway?
Z$ ./example/run ''
You ran the root command. Now try --help.
Z$ ./example/run 'x'
ERROR
Unknown command "x" for "example".
Try --help for usage.
Should have produced an error using '' for the subcommand name.
Z$ ./example/run sub "multi-word quoted string" --flag "another quoted string"
Ran the sub command!
Z$ ./example/run --help
A little example program!
It doesn’t really do anything, but that’s the point.™
USAGE
example [command] [args] [--flags]
EXAMPLES
# Run it:
example
# Run it with some arguments:
example --name=Carlos -a -s Becker -a
# Run a subcommand with an argument:
example sub --async --foo=xyz --async arguments
# Run with a quoted string:
example sub "quoted string"
# Mix and match:
example sub "multi-word quoted string" --flag "another quoted string"
COMMANDS
help [command] Help about any command
sub [command] [args] [--flags] An example subcommand
throw Throws an error
FLAGS
-a --async Run async
-h --help Help for example
--name Your name (jane)
-s --surname Your surname (doe)
-v --version Version for example
Z$ ./example/run sub "multi-word quoted string" --flag "another quoted string"
zsh: command not found: example sub multi-word quoted string --flag another quoted string
Huh? Why did the command work when I typed it myself but no...
I could explain the single-quote argument quoting error if you were running it on Windows. The Go runtime library does not provide single-quoting on Windows. At all. (This is historically the behaviour of C runtime libraries on Windows, too.) It should be using a proper argument vector and not doing its own command-line parsing on other platforms, though.
"bling" is the word you're looking for. It's just a fashion. Fashion is famously cyclic, and we're just in a high-ornamentation part of the cycle. Eventually, restraint will become fashionable again.
As a counter argument, not putting color in help usage text leaves a large amount on the table for readability. The reasonable compromise for those that disagree with this is to set the NO_COLOR environment variable. This should be respected by most things which do use color (and if it's not, that's a bug).
It would be really cool if Fang could generate a TUI form for your app with https://github.com/charmbracelet/huh (by the same org). Is something like that on the roadmap?
That's pretty neat, although it's little more than a coloring wrapper around Cobra. That said, I wrote a small tool for a hackathon and just dropped this in for a bit of whimsy.
It's probably more accurate to say it's a Go Cobra CLI Starter Kit rather just a generic CLI Starter kit. I personally find Cobra bit OTT and bloated and try to avoid it where I can but this could be a nice starter point for my own similar library to suit my needs
33 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 70.7 ms ] threadThey have a TUI framework, too, among a lot of other related things. Some of their projects are Go libraries, some are a CLI tool, such as gum.
[1] https://github.com/charmbracelet/gum
Throughout these years, I have found that cross-compiling is the most challenging part of creating a CLI. When you are building a web back-end, you control the execution environment (usually linux). For CLIs, your users could be on Linux, macOS or Windows. You need to get three x2 binaries (so a total of 6) to have a fair coverage.
I’ve tried cross, but for Windows and macOS you need licenses. There is no straightforward way to give your users Docker images and have them running in a few commands. You can compile on GitHub action machines, but that’s a very slow feedback loop. I wonder if things are better in Go land.
!: https://github.com/rust-starter/rust-starter
(Hello from Charm! I’m one of the authors of this library.)
ETA since I just saw Christian chime in: the Goreleaser author works at Charm.sh =)
[1] https://goreleaser.com
And actually Carlos, who builds GoReleaser, is the true author of Fang and took it from concept to execution.
I started a similar thing, although not as feature-rich as yours. My goal was to follow CLI best practices and add all the boilerplate one needs to build a Rust CLI.
https://github.com/mootoday/cli-template
That said, I am unfamiliar with any licensing for Windows builds.
MacOS has some niche (usually discarded) technicalities like you can only use the SDK on Apple hardware.
for speed you can look for vendors like https://depot.dev/
Though my motivation for this was getting the builds off my machine. I didn't want to be shipping binaries I had built locally.
Definitely won't look as pretty as the parent project though but I prefer kong in terms of the actual code you need to write.
[1] https://github.com/alecthomas/kong
One of the downsides of a lot of these tools is that's exactly what they don't do well: many things don't align or wrap nicely.
For example, here's a comparison of this fang library vs one where I just raw-dogged the usage text: https://imgur.com/a/QWh9TLD – the nice alignment does a lot more than colours. Especially for larger programs with a bunch of flags it can be such a pain. For example from an otherwise quite nice tool: https://imgur.com/a/RELL9Gk – you just completely lose any "overview".
I did spend some time on some better tooling to improve all of this, because manually writing these isn't super-fun either, but not so straight-forward to do well (or at least: not in a way that I like).
Bling is easy. Unsexy usability details are hard.
Why would an example program take 228ms? Huh? 'abc def' is one shell word. --name=abc works fine. But I did give it an argument: the empty string.And why is the output indented two columns from the left margin anyway?
Should have produced an error using '' for the subcommand name. Huh? Why did the command work when I typed it myself but no...* https://github.com/spf13/cobra/blob/6dec1ae26659a130bdb4c985...
I could explain the single-quote argument quoting error if you were running it on Windows. The Go runtime library does not provide single-quoting on Windows. At all. (This is historically the behaviour of C runtime libraries on Windows, too.) It should be using a proper argument vector and not doing its own command-line parsing on other platforms, though.
* https://cs.opensource.google/go/go/+/master:src/os/exec_wind...
* https://cs.opensource.google/go/go/+/master:src/os/proc.go;l...
"bling" is the word you're looking for. It's just a fashion. Fashion is famously cyclic, and we're just in a high-ornamentation part of the cycle. Eventually, restraint will become fashionable again.
Similar work: https://github.com/chriskiehl/Gooey and https://github.com/Sorcerio/Argparse-Interface
I've wanted to do TUI form generation for my own CLI framework since 2023 ( https://github.com/bbkane/warg/issues/71 ), but I still haven't gotten around to it