Overview

Fisk is a fluent-style, type-safe command-line parser. It supports flags, nested commands, and positional arguments.

This is a fork of kingpin, a very nice CLI framework that has been in limbo for a few years. As this project and others we work on are heavily invested in Kingpin we thought to revive it for our needs. We'll likely make some breaking changes, so kingpin is kind of serving as a starting point here rather than this being designed as a direct continuation of that project.

For full help and intro see kingpin, this README will focus on our local changes.

Versions

We are not continuing the versioning scheme of Kingpin, the Go community has introduced onerous SemVer restrictions, we will start from 0.0.1 and probably never pass 0.x.x.

Some historical points in time are kept:

Tag	Description
v0.0.1	Corresponds to the v2.2.6 release of Kingpin
v0.0.2	Corresponds with the master of Kingpin at the time of this fork
v0.1.0	The first release under choria-io org

Notable Changes

• Renamed master branch to main
• Incorporate github.com/alecthomas/units and github.com/alecthomas/template as local packages
• Changes to make staticcheck happy
• A new default template that shortens the help on large apps, old default preserved as KingpinDefaultUsageTemplate
• Integration with cheat (see below)
• Unnegatable booleans using a new UnNegatableBool() flag type, backwards compatibility kept
• Extended parsing for durations that include weeks (w, W), months (M), years (y, Y) and days (d, D) units (v0.1.3 or newer)
• More contextually useful help when using app.MustParseWithUsage(os.Args[1:]) (v0.1.4 or newer)
• Default usage template is CompactMainUsageTemplate since v0.3.0

UnNegatableBool

Fisk will add to all Bool() kind flags a negated version, in other words --force will also get --no-force added and the usage will show these negatable booleans.

Often though one does not want to have the negatable version of a boolean added, with fisk you can achieve this using our UnNegatableBool() which would just be the basic boolean flag with no negatable version.

Arguably Bool() should be un-negatable and we should have added a NagatableBool() but the decision was made to keep existing apps backward compatible.

Cheats

I really like cheat, a great little tool that gives access to bite-sized hints on what's great about a CLI tool.

Since v0.1.1 Fisk supports cheats natively, you can get cheat formatted hints right from the app with no extra dependencies or export cheats into the cheat app for use via its interface and integrations.

$ nats cheat pub
# To publish 100 messages with a random body between 100 and 1000 characters
nats pub destination.subject "{{ Random 100 1000 }}" -H Count:{{ Count }} --count 100

Cheats are stored in a map[string]string, meaning it's flat, does not support subs and when saving cheats, due to the nature of the fluent api, 2 cheats with the same name will overwrite each other.

I therefore suggest you place your cheat in the top command for an intro and then place them where you need them in the first sub command only not deeper, this makes it easy to avoid clashes and easy for your users to discover them.

Let's look how that is done:

// WithCheats() enables cheats without adding any to the top, you
// can also just call Cheat() at the top to both set a cheat and enable it
// once enabled at the top all cheats in all sub commands are accessible
//
// Cheats can have multiple tags, here we set the tags "middleware", and "nats"
// that will be used when saving the cheats.  If no tags are supplied the
// application name is used as the only tag
nats := fisk.New("nats", "NATS Utility").WithCheats("middleware", "nats")

pub := nats.Command("pub", "Publish utility")
// The cheat will be available as "pub", the if the first argument
// is empty the name of the command will be used
pub.Cheat("pub", `# To publish 100 messages with a random.....`)

After that your app will have a new command cheat that gives access to the cheats. It will show a list of cheats when trying to access a command without cheats or when running nats cheat --list.

$ nats cheat unknown
Available Cheats:

  pub

You can save your cheats to a directory of your choice with nats cheat --save /some/dir, the directory must not already exist.

External Plugins

Often one wants to make a CLI tool that can be extended using plugins. Think for example the nats CLI that is built using fisk, it may want to add some commercial offering-specific commands that appear in the nats command as a fully native built-in command.

NOTE: This is an experimental feature that will see some iteration in the short term future.

Fisk 0.5.0 supports extending itself at run-time in this manner and any application built using this version of fisk can be plugged into another fisk application.

The host application need to do some work but the ones being embedded will just work.

app := fisk.New("nats", "NATS Utility")

// now load your plugin models from disk and extend the command
model := loadModelJson("ngs")

app.ExternalPluginCommand("/opt/nats/bin/ngs", model)

The model above can be obtained by running a fisk built command with --fisk-introspect flag.

The idea is that you would detect and register new plugins into your tool, you would call them once with the introspect flag and cache that model. All future startups would embed this command - here nats ngs - right into the command flow.

The model is our ApplicationModel. Plugins written in other languages or using other CLI frameworks would need to emit a compatible model.

Care should be taken not to have clashes with the top level global flags of the app you are embedding into, but if you do have a clash the value will be passed from top level into your app invocation. This should be good enough for most cases but could leed to some unexpected results when you might have a different concept of what a flag means than the one you are embedded into.