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Command Arguments

Arguments are positional arguments passed to the command. For example, if this command was run with mycli arg1 arg2 it would be declared like this:

import {Args, Command} from '@oclif/core'

export class MyCLI extends Command {
static args = {
firstArg: Args.string(),
secondArg: Args.string(),
}

async run() {
// can get args as an object
const {args} = await this.parse(MyCLI)
this.log(`running my command with args: ${args.firstArg}, ${args.secondArg}`)
// can also get the args as an array
const {argv} = await this.parse(MyCLI)
this.log(`running my command with args: ${argv[0]}, ${argv[1]}`)
}
}

Here are the options arguments can have:

static args = {
firstArg: Args.string(
{
name: 'file', // name of arg to show in help and reference with args[name]
required: false, // make the arg required with `required: true`
description: 'output file', // help description
hidden: true, // hide this arg from help
parse: async input => 'output', // instead of the user input, return a different value
default: 'world', // default value if no arg input. Can also be an async function.
defaultHelp: 'a dynamic value' // dynamic default value to show in help output (e.g. current working directory). Can be an async function that returns a string or undefined
options: ['a', 'b'], // only allow input to be from a discrete set
ignoreStdin: false, // set to true to ignore any value provided by stdin
noCacheDefault: false // if true, the value returned by defaultHelp will not be cached in the oclif.manifest.json.
}
),
}

Here are the types of args that Args exports:

  • string
  • integer
  • boolean
  • url
  • file
  • directory
  • custom

For variable length arguments, disable argument validation with static strict = false on the command.

import {Args, Command} from '@oclif/core'

export class MyCLI extends Command {
static args = {
things: Args.string(),
}

static strict = false

async run() {
// If you're using strict=false you should use argv to access the provided args.
const {argv} = await this.parse(MyCLI)
this.log(`running my command with args: ${argv[0]}, ${argv[1]}`)
}
}