bashly is a command-line application that let’s you generate feature-rich command line tools. The idea is that you specify via a YAML file what subcommands, arguments, flags and environment variables you want for your executable, and bashly takes care of generating all the boilerplate on a bash script, so that you can focus on your code. Many languages support similar via libraries, like optparse in ruby.

I recently used it to port a series of scripts for personal use that where all part of a series of commands I use to manage my personal note taking. I turned the all those separate scripts into a CLI with subcommands. Instead of zk_title and zk_today, I know have zk title and zk today, among others).

Here are my observations:

1. The documentation is well done. In particular the examples showed me how to do everything I needed.
2. The ability to check for required environment variables was very useful. If only a particular command requires a certain environment variable, that can be configured too.
3. Reading from stdin or from a file is a very common use case. It’s well supported.
4. Commands can be aliased to shorter names.
5. Flag handling is great. Short flags can be combined (i.e. zk title -ps instead of zk title -p -s)
6. Each command lives in it’s own file. If needed, custom functions that are called from other commands are supported.
7. Some of my previous commands were written in Ruby. bashly supports heredocs, which make it possible to continue using ruby for portions of your script, albeit this is a bit of a hack and makes the script less portable:

/usr/bin/env ruby - ${arguments} <<-RUBY
puts "hello #{ARGV}"
RUBY

Note that for heredocs to work, the following environment variable needs to be set BASHLY_TAB_INDENT=1.

Overall, I was happy with the results. All the boilerplate code like creating global and command --help output, argument and environment variable checking, and flag handling was abstracted away.