dashdash

version 1.14.0 (2016-06-01)

• [issue #20] bashCompletionSpecFromOptions breaks on an options array with an empty-string group.

• Update assert-plus dep to 1.x to get recent fixes (particularly for assert.optional*).

• Drop testing (and official support in packages.json#engines) for node 0.8.x. Add testing against node 5.x and 4.x with make testall.

• [pull #16] Change the positiveInteger type to NOT accept zero (0). For those who might need the old behaviour, see "examples/custom-option-intGteZero.js". (By Dave Pacheco.)

• Bash completion: Add argtypes to specify the types of positional args. E.g. this would allow you to have an ssh command with argtypes = ['host', 'cmd'] for bash completion. You then have to provide Bash functions to handle completing those types via the specExtra arg. See "examples/ddcompletion.js" for an example.

• Bash completion: Tweak so that options or only offered as completions when there is a leading '-'. E.g. mytool <TAB> does NOT offer options, mytool -<TAB> does. Without this, a tool with options would never be able to fallback to Bash's "default" completion. For example ls <TAB> wouldn't result in filename completion. Now it will.

• Bash completion: A workaround for not being able to explicitly have no completion results. Because dashdash's completion uses complete -o default, we fallback to Bash's "default" completion (typically for filename completion). Before this change, an attempt to explicitly say "there are no completions that match" would unintentionally trigger filename completion. Instead as a workaround we return:

    $ ddcompletion --none <TAB>         # the 'none' argtype
    ##-no           completions-##
  
    $ ddcompletion                      # a custom 'fruit' argtype
    apple   banana  orange
    $ ddcompletion z
    ##-no           -fruit-         completions-##
  

  This is a bit of a hack, but IMO a better experience than the surprise of matching a local filename beginning with 'z', which isn't, in this case, a "fruit".

• Bash completion: Document <option spec>.completionType. Add includeHidden option to bashCompletionSpecFromOptions(). Add support for dealing with hidden subcmds.

• Support for generating Bash completion files. See the "Bash completion" section of the README.md and "examples/ddcompletion.js" for an example.

• Add the arrayFlatten boolean option to dashdash.addOptionType used for custom option types. This allows one to create an arrayOf... option type where each usage of the option can return multiple results. For example:

    node mytool.js --foo a,b --foo c
  

  We could define an option type for --foo such that opts.foo = ['a', 'b', 'c']. See "examples/custom-option-arrayOfCommaSepString.js" for an example.

• Trim the published package to the minimal bits. Before: 24K tarball, 144K unpacked. After: 12K tarball, 48K unpacked. npm won't let me drop the README.md. :)

• [issue #9] Support includeDefault in help config (similar to includeEnv) to have a note of an option's default value, if any, in help output.
• [issue #11] Fix option group breakage introduced in v1.9.0.

• [issue #10] Custom option types added with addOptionType can specify a "default" value. See "examples/custom-option-fruit.js".

• Support hidden: true in an option spec to have help output exclude this option.

• [issue #8] Fix parsing of a short option group when one of the option takes an argument. For example, consider tail with a -f boolean option and a -n option that takes a number argument. This should parse:

    tail -fn5
  

  Before this change, that would not parse correctly. It is suspected that this was introduced in version 1.4.0 (with commit 656fa8bc71c372ebddad0a7026bd71611e2ec99a).

• Known issues: #8

• Exclude 'tools/' dir in packages published to npm.

• Known issues: #8

• Support an option group empty string value:

    ...
    { group: '' },
    ...
  

  to render as a blank line in option help. This can help separate loosely related sets of options without resorting to a title for option groups.

• Known issues: #8

• [pull #7] Support for <parser>.help({helpWrap: false, ...}) option to be able to fully control the formatting for option help (by Patrick Mooney) helpWrap: false can also be set on individual options in the option objects, e.g.:

    var options = [
        {
          names: ['foo'],
          type: 'string',
          helpWrap: false,
          help: 'long help with\n  newlines' +
            '\n  spaces\n  and such\nwill render correctly'
        },
        ...
    ];
  

• Known issues: #8

• [pull #6] Support headings between groups of options (by Joshua M. Clulow) so that this code:

    var options = [
        { group: 'Armament Options' },
        { names: [ 'weapon', 'w' ], type: 'string' },
        { group: 'General Options' },
        { names: [ 'help', 'h' ], type: 'bool' }
    ];
    ...
  

  will give you this help output:

    ...
      Armament Options:
        -w, --weapon
  
      General Options:
        -h, --help
    ...
  

• Known issues: #8

• Add support for adding custom option types. "examples/custom-option-duration.js" shows an example adding a "duration" option type.

    $ node custom-option-duration.js -t 1h
    duration: 3600000 ms
    $ node custom-option-duration.js -t 1s
    duration: 1000 ms
    $ node custom-option-duration.js -t 5d
    duration: 432000000 ms
    $ node custom-option-duration.js -t bogus
    custom-option-duration.js: error: arg for "-t" is not a valid duration: "bogus"
  

  A custom option type is added via:

    var dashdash = require('dashdash');
    dashdash.addOptionType({
        name: '...',
        takesArg: true,
        helpArg: '...',
        parseArg: function (option, optstr, arg) {
            ...
        }
    });
  

• [issue #4] Add date and arrayOfDate option types. They accept these date formats: epoch second times (e.g. 1396031701) and ISO 8601 format: YYYY-MM-DD[THH:MM:SS[.sss][Z]] (e.g. "2014-03-28", "2014-03-28T18:35:01.489Z"). See "examples/date.js" for an example usage.

    $ node examples/date.js -s 2014-01-01 -e $(date +%s)
    start at 2014-01-01T00:00:00.000Z
    end at 2014-03-29T04:26:18.000Z
  

• Known issues: #8

• [pull #2, pull #3] Add a allowUnknown: true option on createParser to allow unknown options to be passed through as opts._args instead of parsing throwing an exception (by https://github.com/isaacs).

  See 'allowUnknown' in the README for a subtle caveat.

• Fix a subtlety where a bool option using both env and default didn't work exactly correctly. If default: false then all was fine (by luck). However, if you had an option like this:

    options: [ {
        names: ['verbose', 'v'],
        env: 'FOO_VERBOSE',
        'default': true,    // <--- this
        type: 'bool'
    } ],
  

  wanted FOO_VERBOSE=0 to make the option false, then you need the fix in this version of dashdash.

• [issue #1] Fix an envvar not winning over an option 'default'. Previously an option with both default and env would never take a value from the environment variable. E.g. FOO_FILE would never work here:

    options: [ {
        names: ['file', 'f'],
        env: 'FOO_FILE',
        'default': 'default.file',
        type: 'string'
    } ],
  

• [Backward incompatible change for boolean envvars] Change the interpretation of environment variables for boolean options to consider '0' to be false. Previous to this any value to the envvar was considered true -- which was quite misleading. Example:

    $ FOO_VERBOSE=0 node examples/foo.js
    # opts: { verbose: [ false ],
      _order: [ { key: 'verbose', value: false, from: 'env' } ],
      _args: [] }
    # args: []
  

• Fix for parse.help({includeEnv: true, ...}) handling to ensure that an option with an env but no help still has the "Environment: ..." output. E.g.:

    { names: ['foo'], type: 'string', env: 'FOO' }
  
    ...
  
    --foo=ARG      Environment: FOO=ARG
  

• Transform the option key on the opts object returned from <parser>.parse() for convenience. Currently this is just s/-/_/g, e.g. '--dry-run' -> opts.dry_run. This allow one to use hyphen in option names (common) but not have to do silly things like opt["dry-run"] to access the parsed results.

• Environment variable integration. Envvars can be associated with an option, then option processing will fallback to using that envvar if defined and if the option isn't specified in argv. See the "Environment variable integration" section in the README.

• Change the <parser>.parse() signature to take a single object with keys for arguments. The old signature is still supported.

• dashdash.createParser(CONFIG) alternative to new dashdash.Parser(CONFIG) a la many node-land APIs.

• Add "positiveInteger" and "arrayOfPositiveInteger" option types that only accept positive integers.

• Add "integer" and "arrayOfInteger" option types that accepts only integers. Note that, for better or worse, these do NOT accept: "0x42" (hex), "1e2" (with exponent) or "1.", "3.0" (floats).

• Fix not modifying the given option spec objects (which breaks creating a Parser with them more than once).

First release.