Background

I am designing a CLI for a container build tool I am making. It uses Gentoo’s Portage behind the scenes

Question

I want to give the user the ability to specify a custom package repository. The repository must have a name, URI and sync type.

custom_repo: {
    uri: 'https://...',
    name: 'custom',
    sync_type: 'git',
}

How do I have the user represent this in the CLI? keep in mind, this is not the main input and is optional.

One way is to make this only provide-able via a config file using JSON or another structured data representation. But I want to see if theres a good way to do it in the CLI

What I am thinking of: command --custom-repo uri='https://...',name=custom,sync_type=git --custom-repo ... [main input]

Is this the best way of doing this?

    • @[email protected]
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      11 months ago

      Nix does something like this with the protocol specifier: e.g. git+https://...

      I’m not sure what name means here exactly, but it might make sense to treat that separately, like git remotes:

      tool add [name] git+https://foo

    • Oscar
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      211 months ago

      That is assuming it’s hosted on github.

        • Oscar
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          11 months ago

          Ok, then I don’t understand at all. What happens if I host my git project on https://myawesomeproject.dev/? How can the application infer anything by this URL?

          • @SpaceNoodle
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            011 months ago

            Then replace “github.com” with “myawesomeproject.dev”. There’s more to the URI than just the hostname.

            • Oscar
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              311 months ago

              But you can’t assume that it follows the github format of https:////.git. In my example, I meant that you would just use that url to clone it:

              git clone https://myawesomeproject.dev
              

              One real-world example of this is ziglings.org (though it’s technically just a redirect).

              • @SpaceNoodle
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                -111 months ago

                That’s not a GitHub format; it’s a git format.

                • Oscar
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                  311 months ago

                  No, it isn’t. Git doesn’t care what the url is, as long as it uses a supported transport protocol.