Clamp - a Ruby command-line framework
6 Dec, 2010
In the course of my current project, I've been writing a bunch of command-line utilities. While they're just Ruby scripts, much of their work is interacting with the user: accepting command-line options and arguments, and providing useful feedback in case of errors. So, I wrote a little framework to make it easier. It's called Clamp.
Clamp models a command as a Ruby class, and a command execution as an instance of that class. Command classes look like this:
class SpeakCommand < Clamp::Command
option "--loud", :flag, "say it loud"
option ["-n", "--iterations"], "N", "say it N times", :default => 1 do |s|
Integer(s)
end
parameter "WORDS ...", "the thing to say", :attribute_name => :words
def execute
the_truth = words.join(" ")
the_truth.upcase! if loud?
iterations.times do
puts the_truth
end
end
end
At execution time, Clamp uses the "option" and "parameter" declarations to map command-line arguments onto the command object as instance variables.
There are numerous Ruby libraries out there to help with parsing of command-line options - even a couple built into the standard library - so why write something new? Partly, it's because most of the alternatives only address option parsing. I wanted to focus less on parsing options, and more on modelling the command itself. Clamp is similar in some ways to Thor, the command framework behind Bundler and Rails3 generators, though Thor models commands as methods, rather than classes. It's also quite a bit bigger.
Anyway, next time you're writing a command-line utility in Ruby, I hope you give Clamp a go, and that it makes your job a little bit easier.
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