magic-cli

A foundation for building your own suite of command line tools.

magic-cli exists to make it easy to create a set of tools that work together. It's not a tool you use as-is; it's here to offer a starting point for your own custom command line tools.

Learn more about the origins of magic-cli in The Joy of Internal Tools, a post on the Slack Engineering blog.

Customization

Rename the magic-cli script to whatever you want — for example, if you happen to work for example.com, you might rename it to example. (If you want to keep any of the example commands that come with it, rename them to have that new name as a prefix — for example, rename magic-cli-update to example-update.)

Now, when you run example, it will look for executables in the same directory as itself which have filenames that begin with example-. If there's an executable called example-build, you could run it by typing example build.

Now, when you type example, you'll see example build in the list of supported subcommands.

For extra credit, you can add a human-readable description in that list by putting a comment immediately under the #! line:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# This line will be shown in the list of commands.

You can also define any extra parameters that are required for the script with a # @param line for each parameter:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# This line will be shown in the list of commands.
# @param <command_param> - Longer Description of the Parameter
# @param - If you don’t give a parameter name, a default one will be created for you

Installation

This repository includes a Makefile that will install magic-cli and all of its subcommands into /usr/local/bin:

$ make install

You can also use it to uninstall magic-cli:

$ make uninstall

If you rename magic-cli to something different, change the value of PREFIX in the Makefile.

Updates

An example script for updating the tools is also included; it makes installing the latest tools into a single step process:

$ magic-cli update
Updated tools to 01ec2ef (2016-03-30 16:20:30 -0700)

magic-cli-update provides a starting point for you to use for your own updater. If you're hosting your tools in a git repository, customizing this script just entails modifying the SOURCE_REPO constant at the top of the file. If your needs are more complex, you can replace the fetch_latest_code! and get_version_info methods.