Feature Request: Enable Third Party Subcommands

[aunyks]

Hi! I’d love to have the ability to create and install third party subcommands.

I’m imagining functionality like Git or Cargo, where if I have an executable deno-foo in my PATH, then running deno foo —my —flags will invoke deno-foo with —my —flags as arguments.

Does something like this already exist within Deno? If not, I’d love to help implement.

[aunyks]

@littledivy Is this request formatted properly?

[bartlomieju]

While this is an interesting feature request, there are many questions to answer on how this could be implemented.

@aunyks could you provide some prior art how this feature is implemented in cargo?

[aunyks]

@bartlomieju Of course. Here’s some Cargo documentation on custom subcommands: https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/external-tools.html#custom-subcommands. I couldn’t find official Git documentation for the same feature, but this article conveys the idea: https://www.atlassian.com/git/articles/extending-git.

[dsherret]

I think deno install covers the usecase of global commands? We also have deno task for repo-specific commands.

[kidonng]

If this is only for yourself, it shouldn't be too hard to write a shell function. Fish example:

function deno --argument-names command
    if command --query deno-$command
        deno-$command $argv[2..]
    else
        command deno $argv
    end
end

If you are looking for distribution, deno install is more suitable, as mentioned above.