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12 Factor CLI Apps

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Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps

#21

Post by ISO-morphism »

These are all good points, and I wish more clis were like this. My own pet peeve is un-disablable stdout logging.

> It’s important that each row of your output is a single ‘entry’ of data.

It felt weird to me to use `ls` as an example as it's not immediately obvious it adheres to the advice from the printed output. I suppose they were also trying to highlight the earlier point of differing output format depending on whether output is a tty/pipe.

Unrelated, but I didn't know `ls` was that smart about isatty. Once upon a time I read the '-1' option to print one name per line in the man page and assumed it was necessary for that functionality. Thanks!

Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps

#22

Post by curun1r »

013a wrote: post #10

This is all great advice. The one thing this does miss is distribution, which is a HUGE part of offering a great CLI app. Specifically, I'd say: 1. Make your OFFICIAL distribution channel the primary package manager on each platform (ex: on Mac, homebrew. Ubuntu, apt/snap). Beyond that, support as many as you have capacity to. 2. Also offer an official docker image which fully encapsulates the CLI tool and all of its…

Homebrew is NOT the primary package manager on Mac and I wish people would stop perpetuating that falsehood. Apple includes pkgutil/pkgbuild in the OS and that official package management strategy plays much better with corporate IT control of managed machines.

In my experience, Homebrew always eventually results in pain and complex debugging and it's almost impossible to audit software it installs to prevent the installation of prohibited or dangerous software.

It's really not that hard to build a .pkg file and developers that want to properly support the Mac platform should go down that path before offering Homebrew support.

Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps

#24

Post by dickeytk »

ISO-morphism wrote: post #21

These are all good points, and I wish more clis were like this. My own pet peeve is un-disablable stdout logging. > It’s important that each row of your output is a single ‘entry’ of data. It felt weird to me to use `ls` as an example as it's not immediately obvious it adheres to the advice from the printed output. I suppose they were also trying to highlight the earlier point of differing output format depending on…

I just picked `ls` as it's a common utility everyone understands and isn't some contrived example using `cat`.

I am going to add a note about `ls`'s behavior with isatty. It's sort of conflating a couple of things, but I think it's interesting enough to leave it in.

Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps

#25

Post by deathanatos »

curun1r wrote: post #22
013a wrote: post #10

This is all great advice. The one thing this does miss is distribution, which is a HUGE part of offering a great CLI app. Specifically, I'd say: 1. Make your OFFICIAL distribution channel the primary package manager on each platform (ex: on Mac, homebrew. Ubuntu, apt/snap). Beyond that, support as many as you have capacity to. 2. Also offer an official docker image which fully encapsulates the CLI tool and all of its…

Homebrew is NOT the primary package manager on Mac and I wish people would stop perpetuating that falsehood. Apple includes pkgutil/pkgbuild in the OS and that official package management strategy plays much better with corporate IT control of managed machines. In my experience, Homebrew always eventually results in pain and complex debugging and it's almost impossible to audit software it installs to prevent the ins…

Well, I'll admit this is the first I'm learning of this tool. That said…

The top hit on Google for "os x pkgbuild" is a link into Apple's documentation that 404s. (Further Googling turns up some blog posts, and man pages, so that's good.) Does this support dependencies? How do I get updates to users? How does a user receive updates?

Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps

#26

Post by roylez »

nimish wrote: post #23

#6 is great, except if it causes performance issues: https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/11283 Speed is the ultimate fancy enhancement ;)

Even if it does not cause any performance issues, I dislike it. If the thing runs in terminal, it should be expect to be used in a script thus it would be better to make no assumptions of terminal capabilities and leave the fancy part to external tools, if one is interested. I always hate systemctl's piping to a pager by default. "Do one thing, do it well", don't try to surprise users with fanciness because at work we don't like surprises.

Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps

#27

Post by colemickens »

curun1r wrote: post #22
013a wrote: post #10

This is all great advice. The one thing this does miss is distribution, which is a HUGE part of offering a great CLI app. Specifically, I'd say: 1. Make your OFFICIAL distribution channel the primary package manager on each platform (ex: on Mac, homebrew. Ubuntu, apt/snap). Beyond that, support as many as you have capacity to. 2. Also offer an official docker image which fully encapsulates the CLI tool and all of its…

Homebrew is NOT the primary package manager on Mac and I wish people would stop perpetuating that falsehood. Apple includes pkgutil/pkgbuild in the OS and that official package management strategy plays much better with corporate IT control of managed machines. In my experience, Homebrew always eventually results in pain and complex debugging and it's almost impossible to audit software it installs to prevent the ins…

The best part is that some people think 'brew' is a solid package manager and then show up in Linux and try to make 'linuxbrew' happen (no really, it is a thing).

I just wish everyone would take a day and read an intro to nix/nixpkgs and the world would really be a better place. There are so many "popular" hyped tools these days that can barely do a fraction of what is going on in the Nix ecosystem, but it doesn't seem to get the hype that brew, buildkit, linuxkit, etc all seem to get.

Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps

#28

Post by dickeytk »

roylez wrote: post #26
nimish wrote: post #23

#6 is great, except if it causes performance issues: https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/11283 Speed is the ultimate fancy enhancement ;)

Even if it does not cause any performance issues, I dislike it. If the thing runs in terminal, it should be expect to be used in a script thus it would be better to make no assumptions of terminal capabilities and leave the fancy part to external tools, if one is interested. I always hate systemctl's piping to a pager by default. "Do one thing, do it well", don't try to surprise users with fanciness because at work w…

In practice I've had overwhelming feedback praising our use of spinners in the Heroku CLI and not a single complaint I can think of. In fact, I've had more praise for adding spinners and color than any other change we've put in over 4+ years of development.

That said, you need to be careful. Don't use a spinner if it's not a tty or TERM=dumb. Do use it in some CI environments that support it (Travis, CircleCI) That handles all the issues we've seen and everyone seems to be happy.

Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps

#29

Post by emmanueloga_ »

Don't get me wrong! I love command line apps. But I wonder if we all have a bit of an Stockholm syndrome... there are several things that suck about them...

While writing this I'm thinking on my experience trying to do anything with ffmpeg or imagemagick... or even find.

* For any sufficiently complicated cmd line app, the list of arguments can be huge and the --help so terse as to be become useless. For man pages, the problem is the opposite... the forest hides the tree! I'm sure we all end up using google to look for example invocations.

* Very often completion doesn't work, since custom per-app machinery is needed. For instance: git-completion for with bash-completion.

* Sometimes I end up passing the help output through grep, then copy-pasting the flags from the output, and then hoping I got the right flag.

* ...how about things like regular expressions parameters... always so hard to remember the escaping rules! (and the regex flavor accepted by each different app).

* Not to talk about more complicated setups involved -print0 parameters or anything involving xargs, tee, and formatting with sed and cut, etc.

Is there a better way? Not sure. I like powershell a bit but some of the things I mention above still apply.

I think we may be able to get a workflow that is a bit closer to the tooling we use for writing programs while not being perceived as verbose and heavy (I'm thinking, the kind of workflow I get with a Clojure repl).

Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps

#30

Post by OptionX »

nimish wrote: post #23

#6 is great, except if it causes performance issues: https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/11283 Speed is the ultimate fancy enhancement ;)

And more than that can cause compatibility issues. For example, its a bit of a pain to use utf-8 in the normal windows cmd.
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