clap4shell

clap4shell: standalone clap wrapper for shell scripts

clap4shell is a replacement for getopt based on clap.

clap4shell takes option descriptors as a YAML document from stdin, then prints the parsed result in newline-delimited key=value format which can be eval'd. See example.sh for concrete usage.

Installation

nix profile install github:fumieval/clap4shell

Usage

Configurations look like

name: example
bin_name: $(basename $0)
version: "0.0"
about: sample text
author: Fumiaki Kinoshita <fumiexcel@gmail.com>
args:
  - verbose:
      help: verbose output
      short: v
      long: verbose
  - host:
      takes_value: true
      long: host
      value_name: <HOST>
      help: 'host name'
  - mode:
      long: mode
      help: option with a certain set of possible values
      possible_values: [ herbivore, carnivore, omnivore ]
  - cmd:
      help: command
  - arg:
      help: command arguments
      multiple_values: true

The schema is based on clap_serde.

The typical usage is to embed option definitions in a shell heredoc, pass all arguments to clap4shell and eval its output:

eval "$(clap4shell "$@" <<EOT
...
EOT
)"

Completion

clap4shell-completion <shell> -o <path> subcommand generates an autocompletion script for <shell> and writes the script to path.

clap4shell clap4shell-completion bash -o ./bash-completion.sh < definition.yaml

When "-o" is omitted, it prints an echo command that prints the script, followed by exit 0. Therefore this feature can be used transparently even if the output of clap4shell is passed to eval.

./foo.sh clap4shell-completion > ~/.zsh/_foo.sh

Notes

I intentionally avoided using clap::App::from_yaml because the redundancy of the YAML representation and difficulty of debugging panics. The YAML interface is being deprecated: https://github.com/clap-rs/clap/issues/3087