HelpfulOptions

Processes command-line parameters.

Provides

• rich parameter declaration,
• formatted error messages,
• automatic logging setup,
• formatted paremeter descriptions for --help.

It is intended for use with Mix tasks, Bakeware and other systems for creating Elixir command-line programs.

Approach

This library assumes that the parameters that you want to process are ordered as follows:

SUBCOMMAND --switch PARAMETER OTHER

With each part being repeatable and optional.

A Git example

git remote add -t feature -b main [email protected]:foo/bar
    __________ __________________ _______________________
        ^               ^                   ^
        |               |                   |
    subcommands      switches             other

Subcommands, like Git's remote can be one or more words. You probably want to handle each subcommand with its own block of code, with its own switches.

This libarary's main function is HelpfulOptions.parse/2:

parse/2 does not process subcommands. It assumes you have stripped them off. See HelpfulOptions.Subcommands.strip/1.

Usage

switches = [
  foo: %{type: :string, required: true},
  dry_run: %{type: :boolean},
  bar: %{type: :string, required: true}
]

case HelpfulOptions.parse(System.argv(), switches: switches, other: 1) do
  {:ok, parameters, [url]} ->
    MyApp.add_remote(parameters, url)
    0
  {:error, error} ->
    IO.puts(:stderr, error)
    1
end

switches

Underscores _ in switches are replaced by hyphens -.

So, :dry_run is actually the command-line parameter --dry-run.

Three switches are added by the library:

  [
    ...
    help: %{type: :boolean},
    verbose: %{type: :count},
    quiet: %{type: :boolean}
  ]

See the doc tests in [lib/helpful_options.ex] for more examples.

Installation

The package can be installed by adding helpful_options to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:helpful_options, "~> 0.1.0"}
  ]
end