gogo-cobra

Recursively generate golang cobra --help text?


If I have a cobra-managed golang application, I can invoke mycommand --help to see the top level help and list of commands, mycommand cmd1 --help to see the same for the first command, etc.

Is there a way using the cobra library to recursively print all the commands, flags, and help text in one pass?

https://github.com/spf13/cobra


Solution

  • I was able to hack something up. This is just a simple recursive function that filters out some noise by command name (e.g I skip over autogenerated help and bash completion commands)

    var dumpAllHelp = "dump-all-help"
    var recHelpCmd = &cobra.Command{
        Use:   dumpAllHelp,
        Short: "dump all help texts",
        Long:  "dump all help texts",
        Run: func(_ *cobra.Command, _ []string) {
            dumpHelp(rootCmd, true)
        },
    }
    
    func dumpHelp(c *cobra.Command, root bool) {
        if !root {
            fmt.Println("")
            fmt.Println("========================================================")
            fmt.Println("")
        }
        c.Help()
        for _, child := range c.Commands() {
            if child.Hidden || child.Name() == "completion" || child.Name() == "help" || child.Name() == dumpAllHelp {
                continue
            }
            dumpHelp(child, false)
        }
    }
    
    func init() {
        rootCmd.AddCommand(recHelpCmd)
    }