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Cobra Golang's CLI Library

Murad Bayoun on November 29, 2023

Introduction In Go (Golang), "cobra" is a popular and widely used command-line interface (CLI) library. Cobra provides a simple and eleg...
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Wynand Pieters •

Really love the Cobra framework, been using it to build CLIs for years. One of the greatest features they've added in the last while is support for a completion command.

By running ./myapp completion --help you can see a list of available command, i.e.

Available Commands:
  bash        Generate the autocompletion script for bash
  fish        Generate the autocompletion script for fish
  powershell  Generate the autocompletion script for powershell
  zsh         Generate the autocompletion script for zsh
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And then running help for a specific one tells you how to load it into your shell of choice, e.g. ./myapp completion fish --help will give

Generate the autocompletion script for the fish shell.

To load completions in your current shell session:

    myapp completion fish | source

To load completions for every new session, execute once:

    myapp completion fish > ~/.config/fish/completions/myapp.fish

You will need to start a new shell for this setup to take effect.
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Et voila. Tab completion for your custom CLI. Awesome feature to just get out the box given how powerful the framework already is.