Glove

Typed drivers for external commands in Go.

Glove lets you describe an external CLI as a validated Go command schema, then render and run commands through a small typed driver. Think: os/exec with declared command structure instead of ad hoc argv assembly.

What it is

• a Go library for driving existing tools such as git, docker, kubectl, terraform, or internal binaries
• typed command trees declared with bin, cmd, flag, and arg tags
• explicit command rendering through Driver.Command(...) before execution
• pluggable execution through RunOptions and custom Runner implementations
• not a CLI framework, shell parser, or a fit for order-sensitive token streams such as ffmpeg

Why it exists

Code that shells out to external tools usually drifts toward loose strings, hand-built argv slices, and duplicated validation. That is workable for one command and brittle once a project starts driving a real CLI surface.

Glove keeps the subprocess model explicit while giving it structure:

• command names live in one declared driver tree
• flag and positional rules are validated up front
• rendering and execution stay separate
• tests can inspect commands without spawning processes

See Usage: model for the operational model behind the library.

Core idea

• a driver root declares one binary and the subcommands reachable from it
• each frame value supplies the flags and args for one command level
• intermediate frames are explicit, so the command path is never inferred
• within a frame, flags render before positional arguments
• compilation validates the declaration once; runs reuse the compiled schema

Glove is for Go projects that need a typed control surface over conventional command-tree CLIs.

Install

go get github.com/qlustra/glove

Quick start

package main

import (
	"fmt"

	"github.com/qlustra/glove"
)

type Git struct {
	Bin   glove.Bin `bin:"git"`
	Clone Clone     `cmd:"clone"`
}

type Clone struct {
	Branch string `flag:"--branch,-b"`
	Depth  int    `flag:"--depth"`
	Repo   string `arg:"0,required"`
	Dir    string `arg:"1"`
}

func main() {
	git := glove.New(Git{})

	cmd, err := git.Command(Clone{ // build command, no execution
		Branch: "main",
		Depth:  1,
		Repo:   "https://github.com/acme/project.git",
		Dir:    "./project",
	})
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}

	fmt.Println(cmd.String())
}

This renders to:

git clone --branch main --depth 1 https://github.com/acme/project.git ./project

Use Run(...) and RunWith(...) when you want Glove to execute the rendered command through a runner.

Documentation

• Full docs: Docs index
• Getting started: Usage guides
• API: API reference
• Examples: Git example

Status

Early-stage / experimental

Development

go test ./...

License

Apache 2.0

Conduit is maintained within the Qlustra Engineering Tooling Lab. https://github.com/Qlustra