In CLI design, how to ask the user for a nested structured input?

Programming@programming.dev – 32 points – 5 months ago

Background

I am designing a CLI for a container build tool I am making. It uses Gentoo's Portage behind the scenes

Question

I want to give the user the ability to specify a custom package repository. The repository must have a name, URI and sync type.

custom_repo: {
    uri: 'https://...',
    name: 'custom',
    sync_type: 'git',
}

How do I have the user represent this in the CLI? keep in mind, this is not the main input and is optional.

One way is to make this only provide-able via a config file using JSON or another structured data representation. But I want to see if theres a good way to do it in the CLI

What I am thinking of: command --custom-repo uri='https://...',name=custom,sync_type=git --custom-repo ... [main input]

Is this the best way of doing this?

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Can't this all be deduced from the URI?

https://github.com/org/project.git

The .git suffix indicates git, the project name is the stem (project).

Nix does something like this with the protocol specifier: e.g. git+https://...

I'm not sure what name means here exactly, but it might make sense to treat that separately, like git remotes:

tool add [name] git+https://foo

That is assuming it's hosted on github.

That is an example URI.

Ok, then I don't understand at all. What happens if I host my git project on https://myawesomeproject.dev/? How can the application infer anything by this URL?

Then replace "github.com" with "myawesomeproject.dev". There's more to the URI than just the hostname.

But you can't assume that it follows the github format of https:////.git. In my example, I meant that you would just use that url to clone it:

git clone https://myawesomeproject.dev

One real-world example of this is ziglings.org (though it's technically just a redirect).

That's not a GitHub format; it's a git format.

No, it isn't. Git doesn't care what the url is, as long as it uses a supported transport protocol.

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