CLI Standards

This page lists general standards to adhere to when developing the CLI of our application.

Overview

Our CLI should adopt a “noun” “verb” pattern. This means that the first argument the CLI receives should refer to a noun (essentially a ‘model’ from the MVC world) and the second argument should be a “verb” (which is something to do with the noun).

This is a common pattern used in many modern CLIs!

• GitHub CLI
• Terraform
• Azure CLI
• etc

Architecture

The CommandLineParser class handles command line parsing. The parse function receives command line arguments (via the magic args variable). It has several functions that help you along.

• Parse is a simple function that receives command line args and returns both the Noun and the Verb
  • E.g., credit list → (Credit, List)
• GetCommandLineArgs returns the arguments after the Noun and Verb
  • E.g., credit list → []
  • E.g., credit list abc → ["abc"]
• ParseWithArgs is a combination of both Parse and GetCommandLineArgs
  • E.g., credit list abc → ((Credit, List), ["abc"]