CLI improvements

[stefanpenner]

Guiding Ideas:

broccoli's cli should have:

• a simple implementation (complex features should be avoided)
• a simple developer experience (not all the features, but the ones that matter)

Stuff

• [x] broccoli help and broccoli help serve should display various serve options --port --host (and in the future more
• [x] build and serve should have more options, for example:
  • [x] --brocfile-path= for running specific brocfiles (@chrmod)
  • [x] --cwd= for specifying the cwd of a given brocfile
  • [x] --output-path=
  • [x] --watcher= allowing configuration of which watch type should be used. Some users may need polling due to FS limitations etc. options = polling, watchman, events
  • [x] --watch= allow toggling the watcher (for both build and watch) #

[chrmod]

@stefanpenner what --watch option should do for build command?

[stefanpenner]

@stefanpenner what --watch option should do for build command?

build --watch should be the same as serve but without HTTP server.

In theory we may just want to have a build that optionally:

• can serve
• can build
• can rebuild

[chrmod]

@stefanpenner any suggestions on how help should change its behavior? do we look for more informative descriptions or rather stylistic improvements like colors?

[stefanpenner]

@chrmod I believe help should enable discovery of functionality. For example help serve should inform us of the various options/arguments. If that is already addressed (i didn't think it was) I would be interested in hearing from you what you feel would improve the help UX.

[chrmod]

@stefanpenner

those are the outputs that commander.js currently generates:

• broccoli

  
  Usage: broccoli [options] <command> [<args ...>]
  
  Options:
  
  -V, --version  output the version number
  -h, --help     output usage information
  
  Commands:
  
  serve|s [options]         start a broccoli server
  build [options] [target]  output files to target directory

• broccoli build --help

  
  Usage: build [options] [target]
  
  output files to target directory
  
  Options:
  
  --brocfile-path <path>  the path to brocfile
  --output-path <path>    the path to target output folder
  --watch                 turn on the watcher
  --watcher <watcher>     select sane watcher mode
  -h, --help              output usage information

• broccoli serve --help

  Usage: serve|s [options]
  
  start a broccoli server
  
  Options:
  
  --port <port>           the port to bind to [4200] (default: 4200)
  --host <host>           the host to bind to [localhost] (default: localhost)
  --brocfile-path <path>  the path to brocfile
  --output-path <path>    the path to target output folder
  --no-watch              turn off the watcher (default: true)
  --watcher <watcher>     select sane watcher mode
  -h, --help              output usage information

I would say it is not bad, but in fact I do prefer how ember-cli does it, and it is:

• listing all commands and all options on call without arguments
• consistent color coding
• nice indentation

AFAIK commander.js tries to stay away from stylistic sugar so if we want something colors, we would have to reimplement that part of commander (should not be much work, but still).

As of this moment broccoli has only two commands which share most options, so there is not much to work with really.

[ro0gr]

json output is one more cool feature from ember-cli.

[stefanpenner]

I think this issue can be closed now. I feel what we have is enough to warrant a release. We can explore some next steps, and open appropriate issues for those once decided.