mini-cli

Mini Cli

This gem is a lean, easy to use CLI framework with a very small footprint. It provides an easy to use argument parsing, help displaying, minimalistic error handling and some tools like executing external programs and gather their output.

Installation

To use Mini CLI just install the gem with

gem install mini-cli

or include it to you project's gemspec:

gem 'mini-cli'

Sample

A very minimalistic program may look like this sample program:

require 'mini-cli'

include MiniCli

help <<~HELP, %w[TARGET [SOURCE]]
  -n, --name NAME  option requires NAME argument, has shortcut
      --url URL    option requires URL argument
  -s, --switch     option without any argument, has shortcut
      --opt        option without any argument

  This is a sample application only.
HELP

main do |args|
  puts "TARGET: #{args['TARGET']}"
  puts "SOURCE: #{args['SOURCE']}" if args.key?('SOURCE')
  puts "NAME: #{args['NAME']}" if args.key?('NAME')
  puts "URL: #{args['URL']}" if args.key?('URL')
  puts "FILES: #{args['FILES']}" unless args['FILES'].empty?
  puts '--switch was given' if args.key?('switch')
  puts '--opt was given' if args.key?('opt')
end

The sample uses the powerful #help method to generate an argument parser which handles the command line for you. You only need to handle the given Hash parameter (named args in the sample) in the body of your #main block.

Executing the sample with --help or -h will provide following help screen:

Usage: sample [OPTIONS] TARGET [SOURCE]

Valid Options:
-n, --name NAME  option requires NAME argument, has shortcut
    --url URL    option requires URL argument
-s, --switch     option without any argument, has shortcut
    --opt        option without any argument

This is a sample application only.

See the ./samples directory for more sample programs…