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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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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