Documentation for derive clap

[hasezoey]

Note: i am still kinda new to rust, so i dont know the actual name what clap actually is in this case (is it called a Attribute?)

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I am currently looking for documentation for clap (the thing you use when also using derive), but i could not find anything and i also dont quite know where it comes from (i dont import it, but it works), so i came here to ask where to find documentation about it

for context, i mean clap as in #[clap(short, long, etc)]:

#[derive(Parser)]
#[clap(author, version, about, long_about = None)] // this
struct Cli {
    #[clap(short, long)] // this
    verbose: bool,
}

PS: the most likely case where this clap is is from clap_derive, but that package does not really have much documentation (reference)

[epage]

We refer to this as a "Derive API" (as compared to using the builder pattern in our Builder API). From our API docs and repo README we link out to a derive tutorial and reference documentation.

Didn't expect people to go through clap_derive to find it since its pretty much an internal crate. I'll update that to link to these two documents.

[epage]

btw another good resource is https://rust-cli.github.io/book/index.html

[hasezoey]

thanks derive_ref/README.md was helpful, i did not find it because i was looking through docs.rs/clap and docs.rs/clap_derive (and local versions generated with cargo doc, where i had also found clap_derive)

so does this document (derive_ref/README) also somewhere exist in the documentation (generated with cargo)?

btw another good resource is https://rust-cli.github.io/book/index.html

yes, i more or less know about rust now, but i did not know the terminology of this specific thing or where to look where it was defined

[epage]

#3314

[epage]

i did not find it because i was looking through docs.rs/clap

If you look in the Table of Content at https://docs.rs/clap/latest/clap/ you'll see those documents are linked to from there. We have #3189 for collecting feedback on the derive documentation but I don't think the suggestions there would have helped in this case. structopt (clap_derive's predecessor) had an advantage in that it was the only API so it could make it more front and center in docs.rs. That isn't the case now with it being integrated into clap. The discussion in that Issue mostly focuses on creating a dummy module to have the docs under but that has a similar discoverability issue as the current link (or worse because you'd have to dig into an unrelated module).

yes, i more or less know about rust now, but i did not know the terminology of this specific thing or where to look where it was defined

https://rust-cli.github.io/book/index.html is one step up from learning Rust and helps you solve CLI problems in Rust (like it also covers testing which I should update with trycmd).