guardrail VS cli-guidelines

What's the use case? I was thinking about this exact issue because my product ships several CLI tools, but I wasn't convinced it would be worth the effort.

An OpenAPI specification describes an HTTP interface, and I see it as useful because it makes it easier to write code in language-of-choice to generate HTTP requests (by generating client libraries from the OpenAPI spec).

For a CLI, the interface is the command-line. Usually people type these commands, or they end up in bash scripts, or sometimes they get called from programming language of choice by shelling out to the CLI. So I could see a use case for a CLI spec, which would make it easier to generate client libraries (which would shell out to the CLI)... but it seems a little niche.

Or maybe, as input to a documentation tool (like Swagger docs). I would imagine if you're using a CLI library like Python's Click, most of that data is already there. Click Parameters documentation: https://click.palletsprojects.com/en/8.1.x/parameters/

Or maybe, you could start from the spec and then generate code which enforces it. So any changes pass through the spec, which would make it easy to write code (server and client-side) / documentation / changelogs. Some projects like this: Guardrail (Scala) https://github.com/guardrail-dev/guardrail , and Connexion (Python) https://github.com/spec-first/connexion .

But without this ecosystem of tooling, documenting your CLI in a specification didn't really seem worth the effort. Of course, that's a bootstrapping problem.

You may have some luck with Guardrail https://github.com/guardrail-dev/guardrail/

The Command Line Interface Guidelines [1] says:

> Do not read secrets from environment variables

> Secrets should only be accepted via credential files, pipes, `AF_UNIX` sockets, secret management services, or another IPC mechanism

Which one of these do you use? On github it seems common for projects to use environment variables for secrets.

[1] https://clig.dev/#environment-variables

Seems they took a small step back from their previous "don't bother with man pages" stance. Now it's "Consider providing man pages."

I still find it a rather shocking order of priority, honestly.

https://clig.dev/#documentation

- E. `blah project foo --edit`

Wondering if there was any guidance on this from the UNIX people. Perhaps scoping should be done using the file system. `cd path/to/project && blah edit`. Like git does with `git --cwd=path/to/project`. Maybe a virtual FS could even be used. Then you wouldn't have to continuously type in the scope with each command. Interesting thinking about how to maintain state in the terminal...thinking about how Python's virtual env bin/activate modifies the shell.

Found an interesting guide here: https://clig.dev/

Capturing these guidelines is one of the primary reasons that https://clig.dev/ exists.

You may want to take a look at various existing CLIs to get inspiration on how they operate, the user feedback loop and the ergonomics on using them. Here is a great website on some CLI structing guidance https://clig.dev/