pdcastro commented 5 years ago

Placeholder feature issue -- requires further discussion

This is a generalisation of several specific feature requests from CLI end users:

89, #462, #695, #789, #837, #1001, #1043, #1697 and more

Implement a consistent flag through all CLI commands to enable "scriptable/CI/robot mode", as opposed to "human/interactive mode":

Interactive mode assumes a human reading the output:

Interactive menus
Confirmation prompts
Spinning animations, ASCII control codes that move the cursor
Condensed messages (balena-io/balena/issues/1653)
Suggested alternatives to what the user actually requested (@imrehg's case: balena ssh: inexistent device UUID causes all devices to be listed, good for humans but makes it harder to write scripts)

Scriptable/CI/robot mode produces parseable output like JSON / CSV / TSV:

Places greater importance on backwards compatibility of printed output
Never presents a selection menu nor asks for confirmation (either succeeds in delivering what was requested through command-line options and configuration files, or fails with process exit status codes and parseable error messages)
Behind the scenes, interactive mode calls scriptable mode then parses and reformats the output

CLI can automatically detect whether stdin is a tty terminal (@CameronDiver's proposal)

Assume interactive mode if stdin is a tty terminal, otherwise scriptable mode
Explicit flags like --interactive and --noninteractive allows bypassing auto detection
- Compatibility with existing customers' (and @imrehg's) :-) scripts that parse interactive output
- Easier to write automated end-to-end tests

Front conversations

imrehg commented 5 years ago

This would be very useful to have, as otherwise e.g. balena ssh in scripting mode can connect to the completely wrong device, if used in a script and given an invalid UUID or a UUID that the user cannot connect to. In that case, the menu is popped up, and in interactive mode, the first device is connected to.

Thus for SSH at least could work as well:

if given a UUID, do not prompt the menu (i.e. assume that the user wanted to connect to that device and nothing else)
prompt if no UUID is given, since then it should be logical that something needs to be selected

pdcastro commented 4 years ago

Finding related to this issue: @CameronDiver pointed out that oclif has a cli-ux.table function that adds several command-line options for data formatting (csv, json, yaml) that could be handy to have in a scriptable / parseable mode:

https://oclif.io/docs/table

OPTIONS
  -x, --extended          show extra columns
  --columns=columns       only show provided columns (comma-separated)
  --csv                   output is csv format [alias: --output=csv]
  --filter=filter         filter property by partial string matching, ex: name=foo
  --no-header             hide table header from output
  --no-truncate           do not truncate output to fit screen
  --output=csv|json|yaml  output in a more machine friendly format
  --sort=sort             property to sort by (prepend '-' for descending)

jellyfish-bot commented 4 years ago

[ntzovanis] This issue has attached support thread https://jel.ly.fish/1418fb56-c0b7-4861-8ab1-75584e15f367

jellyfish-bot commented 4 years ago

[rahul-thakoor] This issue has attached support thread https://jel.ly.fish/a675f6e4-6dcf-4de9-a566-a6e52da23104

jellyfish-bot commented 3 years ago

[pdcastro] This issue has attached support thread https://jel.ly.fish/1e5ecda0-b7d7-4f7e-9e8e-935861e479b9

balena-io / balena-cli

Implement scriptable (non-interactive) mode #1089

89, #462, #695, #789, #837, #1001, #1043, #1697 and more