CLI in ruby using OptionParser or GetoptLong

Few days ago I’ve created a script for the project I’m working on. It was an ugly script with hardcoded values, but it did ther job - create tokens on request. But I’ve decided to improve it a bit, because sometimes I needed to change params and I’ve added ability to submit params from the command line. Of course, there are a lot of awesome libraries such as dry-cli, TTY Toolkit or cli-kit from Shopify, but in most cases you can use standard ruby libraries like OptionParser or GetoptLong. Lets see how you can create a CLI utils with those libraries just in few minutes.

We will create simple app, which will ask for your name for the time of the day. If there’s no input - script will show you a help screen with list of required and optional arguments.

GetoptLong

We will start with GetoptLong library.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require "getoptlong"

opts = GetoptLong.new(
  [ '--help', '-h', GetoptLong::NO_ARGUMENT ],
  [ '--name', '-n', GetoptLong::REQUIRED_ARGUMENT ],
  [ '--time', GetoptLong::OPTIONAL_ARGUMENT ]
)

options = {}

help_message = <<-EOF
Usage: greeting.rb [options]

-h, --help:
   show help

--name yourname, -n yourname:
   your name

--time time_of_the_day:
   time of the day
      EOF

opts.each do |opt, arg|
  case opt

  when "--help"
    puts help_message

  when "--name"
    options[:name] = arg

  when "--time"
    options[:time] = arg
end
end

if options.empty?
  puts help_message
else
  puts "Good #{options[:time]}, #{options[:name]}"
end

Our code is simple - we create an instance of GetoptLong class with list of available params, then in case of match with param name we do execute some code.

OptionParser

Next stop - OptionParser. Similar with GetoptLong we create an instance of OptionParser class with list of available params. There are an opts.banner option which allow us to add some text before list of available params.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'optparse'


option_parser = OptionParser.new do |opts|
  opts.banner = 'Usage: greeting.rb [options]'

  opts.on '-n', '--name=NAME', 'Set name'
  opts.on '-t', '--time=TIME', 'Set time'
end

options = {}

option_parser.parse!(into: options)

if options.empty?
  puts option_parser
else
  puts "Good #{options[:time]}, #{options[:name]}"
end

Every solution is simple and easy to implement without any additional library, but OptionParser code looks more compact and readable, isn’t it?