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12 Factor CLI Apps

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Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps

#141

Post by Riverheart »

jessaustin wrote: post #133
JepZ wrote: post #121

> 7. Prompt if you can Please don't. There is nothing wrong with interactive tools, but by default, they should not be. So instead of making non-interactive session possible via flags, the default should be to be non-interactive. If there is an option to start an interactive session, everything is fine. Otherwise, you would never know when your script could run into some kind of interactive session (and therefore bre…

My interpretation was that the prompt is for required information. In the example graphic, "run demo" really does require that "stage" be specified. This is considered more user-friendly than simply crashing. If you don't want to see the prompt, provide that information as a flag or in a config file or whatever.

This is how Powershell treats mandatory arguments. Provide args via flag/position or be prompted for input. You can always break out with Ctrl+C if you'd rather modify the command.

Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps

#142

Post by Riverheart »

scbrg wrote: post #104
dickeytk wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For people that like man pages (there appears to be lots of you) do you think that man pages are more important than web or in-cli docs? Or just that they should be written in addition to and not missed out on? My (current) position is that they're useful, but not worth the extra effort for most CLIs. It's a cost-benefit thing. I'm genuinely curious as I've never had anyone request man pages in our CLI.

I see no benefit whatsoever to web docs over man pages. man pages are immediately available, where you are (the CLI) without an internet connection or a web browser. I expect the -h flag to give me a summary of the flags and arguments, to remind me of the particular name of the flag I'm missing. I most certainly don't want the whole documentation there, partly because the whole documentation is (presumably) large eno…

In my limited experience, manpages give you a wall of text when 9/10 times you just want a oneliner example of how to do something. Web resources generally address the lack of real world examples in manpages.

Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps

#144

Post by [deleted] »

emmanueloga_ wrote: post #29

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, t…

[deleted]

Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps

#145

Post by Riverheart »

dickeytk wrote: post #16
breckuh wrote: post #14

> 1. Great help is essential I like how this is their #1. In my opinion the best way to do this is with tldr. https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr I'd highly recommend folks create a tldr page for their CLI app. Add 4-8 examples to cover 80%+ of the most common use cases. -h flags, readmes & man pages can cover the other 20%.

I almost want to rewrite the help section to encourage examples even more. They're incredibly valuable. I hadn't considered this before you mentioned it, but oclif CLIs could integrate to tldr pretty well. It already supports arrays of strings for examples.

Agreed on making examples more important. Powershell, for example, let's you "get-help command -examples" to just retrieve those.

Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps

#146

Post by purerandomness »

wingerlang wrote: post #137
Walkman wrote: post #83

Unless you already know your users will want man pages, I wouldn’t bother also outputting them as they just aren’t used often enough anymore. I don't know where this is coming from, me and my colleagues are reading man pages every day. I would be interested how much others read them.

As you're getting mostly replies agreeing - I never read man pages. I look up the odd parameter every now and then though.

Do you mean you look up parameters somewhere else, e.g. in a web browser using google?

Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps

#147

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

emmanueloga_ wrote: post #29

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, t…

At this point I'm not really sure what makes command-line so great. We should have something like it in the GUI sapce that works much better but, like you said, "stolkholm syndrome".

Why can't a pipeline be a more complicated multi-io workflow? In a 2D GUI this would be trivial to construct and read, but in a 1D command line it would get confusing in a hurry. And the concept works much better with AV, I can easily construct and reason about complicated arrangements of audio and video inputs and outputs, with mixers, compositors, filters, shaders, splitters, etc. between them.

Instead we worship text. Is that because manipulating text is actually more useful, or because our tools are only good for working with text?

Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps

#148

Post by shoo »

stuaxo wrote: post #143

"12 factor" anything seems to be a symptom of the over-complexity of modern apps, go back and rethink.

i found the original 12 factor website had a number of pretty reasonable suggestions based on experience of people who ran a business doing operations for other people's web apps.

sure, web apps are themselves probably over complicated, but given that you're doing a web app, the recommendations arent bad. compare to where things have gone since, with containerisation.

Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps

#150

Post by thrower123 »

Walkman wrote: post #83

Unless you already know your users will want man pages, I wouldn’t bother also outputting them as they just aren’t used often enough anymore. I don't know where this is coming from, me and my colleagues are reading man pages every day. I would be interested how much others read them.

When man pages are good, they're good. When they are bad, they are super verbose, incomprehensible, sparse, or otherwise completely useless.
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