Quimby

Quimby makes it easy to add subcommands to a Go executable, with their own subcommands and automatic help output. It's a wrapper around the "flag" package.

Example usage

Declare a struct type that embeds *quimby.Flagger, along with an fields you want to capture as flags.

type Echo struct {
	*quimby.Flagger
        echoed string
}

Now we need to make our type implement the quimby.Command interface. That requires three methods that aren't already provided by *quimby.Flagger:

func (c *Echo) Desc() string {
	return "Echo the input string."
}

func (c *Echo) SetFlags() {
	c.StringVar(&c.echoed, "input", "", "Text that will be echoed")
}

func (c *Echo) Run() {
	fmt.Println(c.echoed)
}

Maybe we write another dozen commands after that. Maybe we implement ls. When we want to actually wire them up, we do something like this:

package main

import "github.com/redneckbeard/quimby"

func main() {
	quimby.Add(&Echo{}, &Ls{})
	quimby.Run()
}

Now we've got a program to compile. Assuming this is somewhere on your GOPATH as nix, we can install it and run it. With no arguments, it will list our commands.

$ go install nix
$ nix
Available commands:
  help
  echo
  ls
Type 'nix help <command>' for more information on a specific command.

The help command is built in, because I care about you. Running it on our echo command will display the return value of the Desc() method we implemented, plus output info about all the flags we registered.

$ nix help echo
Echo the input string.

Options:
-input     Text that will be echoed

Running the echo command itself also works.

$ nix echo -input="Here's some text."
Here's some text.