A very opinionated Ruby library for parsing CLI input. Extracted from my simple_configure project.
Cinchcli at its core is a command line parsing library combined with a little bit of magic. It takes a very declarative approach to building CLI tools. You describe your CLI tool in a JSON file. Cinchcli takes that JSON file and Ruby's ARGV as parameters and builds a scaffold for your CLI tool. It outputs a Hash of options parsed from the CLI input if the CLI input is valid or else it outputs a error message. It allows you to focus only on the core of your CLI tool instead of focusing on parsing CLI options.
You can install Cinchcli by running
gem install cinchcli
To use Cinchcli in a project, first install it and then require the cinchcli module
require 'cinchcli`This should provide you access to the Cinchcli module. Cinchcli module has a CinchCliBuilder class that can be used to develop a CLI parser. CinchCliBuilder takes in two arguments. First one is a json file and the second one is the ARGV parameter from Ruby. Here is a simple CLI tool using this method
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# This code was taken from https://github.com/lsegal/yard/blob/master/bin/yard. The code is licensed under the MIT License.
# We do all this work just to find the proper load path
path = __FILE__
while File.symlink?(path)
path = File.expand_path(File.readlink(path), File.dirname(path))
end
$:.unshift(File.join(File.dirname(File.expand_path(path)), '..', 'lib'))
require 'testcli'
require 'cinchcli'
parsed_cli_args = CinchCliBuilder.new("testcli.json",ARGV)
TestCli.run(parsed_cli_args)