Generate help text from command options

[tleyden]

I have the following help text:

func (c *cloudformationStopInstancesCommand) Help() string {

	helpText := `
Usage: cloudformation stop-instances [options]
  Stops all instances in the given cloudformation stack
Options:
  -stackname=stackname      The name of the cloudformation stack
  -region=region            The AWS region
 `
	return strings.TrimSpace(helpText)

}

but I was wondering if it possible to generate the Options section from the options usage params?

stackname := cmdFlags.String("stackname", "", "The name of the cloudformation stack")
region := cmdFlags.String("region", "", "The AWS region")

Right now I am duplicating the usage strings. I feel like I'm doing something wrong here..

[mitchellh]

You can, but I don't think its this packages job to do so. I purposely designed the "cli" package to not care about command line parsing, which I viewed as a separate and complex task in its own right. That is why this package only deals with []string and doesn't do any CLI parsing, allowing you to use flag or any 3rd party flag parsing.

If another tool lets you turn your options into help text, I'd recommend you use that on top of CLI, rather than it being built in here.

[tleyden]

Thanks, makes sense!