I’m currently building a tool to help managing severals servers
simultaneously for Softvision Media.
As I decided to write the tool in Ruby, I’ve been looking for a
framework to create command-line executables. On GitHub I stumbled over
commander by TJ
Holowaychuk of VisionMedia that provides a
simple DSL for this task. It integrates with OptionParser and the
Highline gem for user interaction. It automatically creates common
options such as --help and --version, as well as detailed
descriptions about possible commands.
A simple executable could be something like this (taken from commander’s readme):
require 'rubygems'
require 'commander'
program :name, 'Foo Bar'
program :version, '1.0.0'
program :description, 'Stupid command that prints foo or bar.'
command :foo do |c|
c.syntax = 'foobar foo'
c.description = 'Displays foo'
c.when_called do |args, options|
say 'foo'
end
end
command :bar do |c|
c.syntax = 'foobar bar [options]'
c.description = 'Display bar with optional prefix and suffix'
c.option '--prefix STRING', String, 'Adds a prefix to bar'
c.option '--suffix STRING', String, 'Adds a suffix to bar'
c.when_called do |args, options|
options.default :prefix => '(', :suffix => ')'
say "#{options.prefix}bar#{options.suffix}"
end
end
There are still some rough edges, but in general it works pretty well.