opts: a small and opinionated argument parser for Go

Basics

An opts Group stores a set of options and provides methods to define and parse them. NewGroup creates an empty group. The parameter passed to NewGroup becomes the *Group.Name.

Options (aka, flags) are added to a Group by calling type-specific methods on the Group. These methods come in two forms: long and short. The long versions take three arguments: a pointer to store the value, a name, and a default value. The short versions take only the pointer and name arguments since they default to the zero value for that type. E.g., *Group.StringZero defaults to "" and *Group.IntZero defaults to 0. Boolean options are an exception: they always default to false. Thus, there is only *Group.Bool for boolean options.

Valid option names must not be empty, must not begin with "-", and must not contain whitespace, control characters, quotes, backslashes, or equal signs. Option definition methods will panic if a name is invalid.

After all options are defined, a call to *Group.Parse will attempt to assign values to options. Parse takes a slice of strings as an argument. This slice should contain everything on the command line other than the name of the program. In other words, users should usually pass os.Args[1:], or its equivalent, to Parse.

Parse will return an error if a user passes an unknown option, if an option is missing a value, or if a value cannot be parsed as its type. If Parse returns without error, then the variables associated with options are ready for use. If Parse returns an error, then those variables are not safe to use.

Parsing stops at the first non-option argument. After successful parsing, *Group.Args returns remaining command-line arguments.

As a usage example, imagine a tool that validates and optionally corrects the case conventions in one or more files.

og := opts.NewGroup("caser")

cfg := struct {
	rcfile     string
	convention string
	strictness uint
	verbosity  uint
	dryRun     bool
	write      bool
}{}

og.String(&cfg.rcfile, "rcfile", "caser.ini")
og.String(&cfg.convention, "convention", "camel")
og.Uint(&cfg.strictness, "strictness", 3)
og.UintZero(&cfg.verbosity, "verbosity")
og.Bool(&cfg.dryRun, "dry-run")
og.Bool(&cfg.write, "write")

// Later...
if err := og.Parse(os.Args[1:]); err != nil {
	// Handle the error.
}

// No error? The values in cfg are safe to use and og.Args() returns everything
// left of os.Args[1:] after parsing stopped.

Command Line Syntax

The syntax for options is largely the same as for Go's flag library.

-option    // one dash is accepted
--option   // two dashes are accepted
-option=x  // non-boolean flags only
-option x  // non-boolean flags only

On the command line, options can begin with one or two dashes; they are equivalent during parsing. As such, there is no distinction between long and short options. This means there is no way to stack options. That is, -abc is always read as one option, named "abc", rather than -a -b -c. Boolean options do not accept arguments; they are switches. All boolean options are initially false. If a boolean option is present on the command line, the option's value is set to true.

Although the library does not distinguish long from short options when parsing, it can provide users a short and a long option for use on the command line or in scripts.

cfg := struct {
	helpWanted    bool
	versionWanted bool
}{}

og.Bool(&cfg.helpWanted, "help")
og.Bool(&cfg.helpWanted, "h")
og.Bool(&cfg.versionWanted, "version")
og.Bool(&cfg.versionWanted, "V")

Opinionated?

Here are some of the key ways that this library is opinionated.

• Single dash and double dash are identical. When parsing arguments, the library treats, e.g., -help and --help as if they were identical. (In this way, the library follows flag in Go's standard library.)
• No (traditional) short options and no automatic binding of long and short options. The library does not distinguish traditional short options (preceded by a single dash, always one letter and, stackable) from traditional long options (preceded by two dashes, more than one letter, not stackable). Although users can bind two options to one variable, the library does not provide methods that take two options at once and bind them to the same variable. (Again, this is like Go's flag library.)
• No automatic usage. Although most option parsing libraries provide ways to generate formatted help messages, opts does not. It's more work to write help messages by hand, but I think the results can be worth it.
• Booleans always default to false, and they never accept arguments. They function only as switches: if a boolean option appears on the command line, its value becomes true.
• Types are limited. The library provides options for the following types: boolean, date (using civil.Date), duration, float64, int, string, and uint. Users cannot extend the types.