guardrail VS iron-cats-example

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/

We've seen in this tutorial the extreme readability of our small API offered by Iron and Cats can consult the code and test instructions of the finished example on https://github.com/Iltotore/iron-cats-example