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12 Factor CLI Apps

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Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps

#151

Post by cpburns2009 »

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…

Why would you put a CLI tool in a docker instance? I'd understand if it were a server environment or web application.

Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps

#152

Post by felixfbecker »

agumonkey wrote: post #112
Already__Taken wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Powershell made 2 things gospel and I'm just sad it's going to take 20 years for other operating systems to realize that's the way to do it and something that replaces linux to see it in practice (i.e. it just won't) 1. Auto-complete is by-design part of the language/shell 1. Pre-approved Verb list that prefix commands helps discoverability and usability no end. Still learning? Get- will literally never cause a probl…

I never really found the verb list to be entirely satisfactory. It's great that they gave boundaries but I find it too verbose. There are other kinds of syntactic ergonomics with concise vocabulary (lisp has ! xxx p$ for instance, they're a bit harder to swallow but I find the code a bit more poetic and easier to remember as a pattern). About the objects vs strings, Kalman Reti (of Symbolics IIRC) talked [1] about ho…

I like it. Nowadays CLIs got out of hand with verbs, every CLI assigns a very specific meaning to their verbs and it's not clear at all. Just look at kubectl: https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/generated/kubectl/kubec... What is the difference between "get" and "describe"? It's totally not obvious what "drain", "cordon", "taint", "scale" or "expose" do. Something like Set-KubeReplicaCount describes way more accurately what scale actually does. Or New-KubeService for "expose".

Remember that you can always use and create aliases, so you could still use kube-scale or kube-expose in the terminal if you want. But for scripts readability is the most important thing. Any newcomer can look at any PowerShell script and know what it does. And any newcomer could type in New-Kube, hit tab, and see what new things you can create in Kubernetes, instead of having to google what the command for creating a service is.

Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps

#153

Post by felixfbecker »

davemp wrote: post #132
Already__Taken wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Powershell made 2 things gospel and I'm just sad it's going to take 20 years for other operating systems to realize that's the way to do it and something that replaces linux to see it in practice (i.e. it just won't) 1. Auto-complete is by-design part of the language/shell 1. Pre-approved Verb list that prefix commands helps discoverability and usability no end. Still learning? Get- will literally never cause a probl…

I find PS tab complete to be sub par compared to fish. It’s too aggressive when there are multiple completions.

What do you mean by aggressive?

Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps

#154

Post by agumonkey »

felixfbecker wrote: post #152
agumonkey wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never really found the verb list to be entirely satisfactory. It's great that they gave boundaries but I find it too verbose. There are other kinds of syntactic ergonomics with concise vocabulary (lisp has ! xxx p$ for instance, they're a bit harder to swallow but I find the code a bit more poetic and easier to remember as a pattern). About the objects vs strings, Kalman Reti (of Symbolics IIRC) talked [1] about ho…

I like it. Nowadays CLIs got out of hand with verbs, every CLI assigns a very specific meaning to their verbs and it's not clear at all. Just look at kubectl: https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/generated/kubectl/kubec... What is the difference between "get" and "describe"? It's totally not obvious what "drain", "cordon", "taint", "scale" or "expose" do. Something like Set-KubeReplicaCount describes way more accurat…

You're right, these are completely obscure, and part of the friendly neologism fad we're seeing. Please note that the examples I showed about lisps aren't short sighted concepts but very generic ones (predicates, side effects, global variables), hence the limited scope of confusion here.

Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps

#155

Post by dotancohen »

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…

> My own pet peeve is un-disablable stdout logging.

I really think that we need a stdmeta file descriptor. See my comments at the link below, I would appreciate your feedback:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/197809/propose-addi...

Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps

#156

Post by maaaats »

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.

I never read man pages. If I need to check man, the tool failed in being user friendly. I'll then rather search online for what I need and blindly copy the first result on some stack exchange page..

Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps

#157

Post by fiatjaf »

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…

Writing is GUI takes time. With CLI you can provide much more functionality with much less time. You're free to write GUIs for all CLIs in this world, however.

Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps

#158

Post by chriswarbo »

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.

Nix commands show their man pages as their help, e.g. `nix-shell --help` is equivalent to `man nix-shell`. I think this works well, and reduces the burden of writing the same documentation over and over.

Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps

#159

Post by smarinov »

IcePic wrote: post #116
Beowolve wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I understand the basis of your comment. You have the knowledge to know that there are other things that may be "the right way" given your situation. I think what the author is getting at is that there are users who don't have that knowledge. Giving them a hint that is verbose and non arcane can make a world of difference. Speaking from personal experience, there are many developers that I have met who don't have…

Then again, on a recent linux system, the non-ability to write to the file might be permissions. Or an immutable attr, or selinux, or apparmor, or setfacl flags or a RO mount where it lies. As soon as you decide to print out the solution to "can't write to: X" you are in for a page full of advice on what to look for. Perhaps the disk was full, perhaps uid was wrong, perhaps the 5% reserved-for-root-only kicked in. Yo…

Also, on an unrelated note, I would never ever suggest novice users to blindly just give `chmod +w` to random locations. This is only marginally better than the `chmod 777 ` that used to be so spread out in many (e.g. PHP-related) tutorials a decade or two ago.

Re: 12 Factor CLI Apps

#160

Post by fiatjaf »

Is it just me or every now and then Medium opens with what looks like to be a snapshot of the article instead of the HTML? I can't select text or scroll the page. If I refresh the page everything is normal, though.
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