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Building Rust Command Line Tools

Initial findings based off a useful article found here.

We're using the Clap crate to help bootstrap CLIs.

Useful tools to consider

tl;dr

Initialise an app using cargo new app_name_you_want --bin.

This example diverges from the above article by using the "Clap" crate with the YAML file config.

src/main.rs

Update the file to reflect the following:

#[macro_use] extern crate clap; use clap::App; fn main() { let yaml = load_yaml!("cli.yml"); let matches = App::from_yaml(yaml).get_matches(); // Gets a value for config if supplied by user, or defaults to "default.conf" let config = matches.value_of("config").unwrap_or("default.conf"); println!("Value for config: {}", config); // Calling .unwrap() is safe here because "INPUT" is required (if "INPUT" wasn't // required we could have used an 'if let' to conditionally get the value) println!("Using input file: {}", matches.value_of("INPUT").unwrap()); // Vary the output based on how many times the user used the "verbose" flag // (i.e. 'myprog -v -v -v' or 'myprog -vvv' vs 'myprog -v' match matches.occurrences_of("verbose") { 0 => println!("No verbose info"), 1 => println!("Some verbose info"), 2 => println!("Tons of verbose info"), 3 | _ => println!("Don't be crazy"), } // You can handle information about subcommands by requesting their matches by name // (as below), requesting just the name used, or both at the same time if let Some(matches) = matches.subcommand_matches("test") { if matches.is_present("debug") { println!("Printing debug info..."); } else { println!("Printing normally..."); } } }

src/cli.yml

For the CLI args, set the following:

name: jamaica version: "1.0" author: Dennis O'Keeffe <hello@dennisokeeffe.com> about: Build agnostic app configs args: - config: short: c long: config value_name: FILE help: Sets a custom config file takes_value: true - INPUT: help: Sets the input file to use required: true index: 1 - verbose: short: v multiple: true help: Sets the level of verbosity subcommands: - test: about: controls testing features version: "1.3" author: Someone E. <someone_else@other.com> args: - debug: short: d help: print debug information

Running the above config

cargo run -- src/main.rs --config=made/up/ # ... omitted Rust build output Value for config: made/up/file Using input file: src/main.rs No verbose info cargo run -- --help # shows help output: omitted for now

Repository

https://github.com/okeeffed/developer-notes-nextjs/content/rust/building-rust-clis

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