A command-line interface builder for the Crystal programming language with automatic parsing, validation, and help generation.
Commander is a command-line interface builder library for the Crystal programming language. It provides a DSL for defining commands, flags, and arguments, automatically handling parsing, validation, and help generation. It solves the problem of writing repetitive boilerplate code for CLI applications by offering a structured and type-safe approach.
Crystal developers building command-line tools, utilities, or applications that require complex CLI interfaces with subcommands, flags, and argument parsing.
Developers choose Commander for its automatic type validation, clean DSL, and built-in help generation, which reduces development time and ensures consistent CLI behavior. Its support for persistent flags, recursive commands, and error handling makes it a robust choice for production CLI tools.
Command-line interface builder for the Crystal programming language.
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Supports recursive definition of commands with nested subcommands, enabling complex CLI hierarchies as shown in the example with 'kill <pid>' as a subcommand.
Handles short/long flags, boolean flags, multi-short flags, persistent flags, and global flags with default values and automatic type casting, reducing manual parsing code.
Automatically validates, parses, and casts flag values to correct types (string, int, float, bool), and generates help pages with -h/--help flags, saving development time.
Provides Commander.run(cli, ARGV) for graceful exception handling and supports unmapped flags or input after '--' as arguments, improving user experience.
Tied exclusively to the Crystal ecosystem, limiting adoption for teams using other programming languages or requiring cross-platform CLI tools in polyglot environments.
The DSL-based configuration, while powerful, can be verbose for trivial CLI applications where simpler argument parsing libraries or basic code might be more efficient.
Lacks built-in support for features common in other CLI libraries, such as auto-completion generation, rich output formatting, or interactive prompts, which may require additional work.