command.MarkFlagRequired Does not look at inherited flags

[dallbee]

I believe this is broken behavior, but the documentation isn't entirely clear. It is also not the same as #723.

The functions command.MarkFlagRequired and command.MarkPersistentFlagRequired call return MarkFlagRequired(flags, name) with Flags() and PersistentFlags(), respectively. That causes them to not be aware of any inherited flags on the command.

The documentation for MarkFlagRequired:

// MarkFlagRequired adds the BashCompOneRequiredFlag annotation to the named flag if it exists,
// and causes your command to report an error if invoked without the flag.

Which reads as though it shouldn't distinguish between inherited flags and local flags. Otherwise, you have to re-declare flags at the subcommand that you want to mark them as required.

As a workaround, we're using our own utility function:

// MarkFlagsRequired looks at all flags on the current command and marks any
// matching name(s) as required. Panics if no flag is found.
func MarkFlagsRequired(cmd *cobra.Command, names ...string) {
	// cobra does not merge its local flagset with the persistent flagset 
        // when Flags() is called. By calling InheretedFlags(), we force a merge.
	cmd.InheritedFlags()
	for _, name := range names {
		if err := cobra.MarkFlagRequired(cmd.Flags(), name); err != nil {
			panic(err)
		}
	}
}

It seems like the library methods should be amended to call c.mergePersistentFlags().

[github-actions]

This issue is being marked as stale due to a long period of inactivity

[johnSchnake]

Sounds like the root issue is #961 . Not closing this as duplicate since this expands that issue slightly by pointing out the effect this has on auto-completion.

[johnSchnake]

Agree that its frustrating and confusing to have to differentiate the two the whole time; to the local function it shouldn't really matter where the flag came from, just that it is required for the command.

[shaunco]

This problem is made a bit worse by the cobra-cli's default way of using init() functions across various commands and root.go, since init() functions are processed within a package in alphabetical order of the filename ... which means root.go is almost always last and other init() calls that might try to make rootCmd flags required will do so before the int() in root.go has even executed.

Would be really nice to see cobra-cli move to a centralized set of AddCommand calls in root.go rather than having each cmd register itself.