Bonzai! Dominate the Command Line

🚧 under construction 🚧

Installation

🎉 Bonzai shamelessly requires Go 1.18+ 💋

1. Install Go 1.18 and the tooling your require for it
2. go install github.com/rwxrob/bonzai@latest
3. import "github.com/rwxrob/bonzai"
4. Consider using the template to get started

😎 Yes, we use the wonderful new generics all over. 👍

Welcome to Bonzai

Yes, "banzai" is something people yell going into battle. But isn't that what making command line utilities in Go (instead of your favorite shell script) actually is?

And yes, "bonsai" trees are well-manicured, meticulously crafted, miniature trees that rival their larger cousins, just like Bonzai command and data node trees. They are unlike anything you've probably encountered so far, no getopt dashes (we kind of hate them), no ugly commander interface to learn, no 12637 lines of shell tab completion bloat to source before your command will complete, just well manicured nested-tab-complete-with-magical-aliases-enabled commands organized into rooted node trees for your command-line enjoyment. Your right-pinky will be particularly grateful.

But wait, there's more! What about all those other tasks you need to do to make a command line application honorable in anyone's eyes? Tools are needed.

Contributors/PRs Welcome

... especially for "Completers", included popular commands, and Runtime Detection.

Speaking of sharing, why not send a PR for your addition to the ever growing collection of comp subpackage Completers for everything from days of the week, to tab-driven inline math calculations, to a list of all the listening ports running on your current system.

CONTRIBUTING

"It's spelled bonsai/banzai."

We know. The domains were taken. Plus, this makes it more unique and easier to find once you know the strange spelling we chose to use. Sorry if that triggers your OCD.

If you must know, the primary motivator was the similarity to a well-manicured tree (since it is for creating trees of commands). And Buckaroo Banzai was always a favorite. We like to think he would use Bonzai today to make amazing things.

On a lighter note, it just so happens that "banzai" means 'a traditional Japanese idiom meaning "ten thousand years" of long life,' a cheer used in celebrations. So combining the notion of a happy, little, well-manicured, beautiful tree and "ten thousand years of long life" works out just fine for us.

It turns out that the "call to war" associated with Bonzai is not entirely without merit as well. Bonzai makes short work of creating offensive and defensive tool kits all wrapping into one nice Go binary, popular for building single-binary Linux container distros (like BusyBox and Alpine, watch for Bonzai Linux soon), as well as root kits, and other security tools

What People Are Saying

"It's like a modular, multicall BusyBox builder for Go with built in completion and embedded documentation support."

"The utility here is that Bonzai lets you maintain your own personal 'toolbox' with built in auto-complete that you can assemble from various Go modules. Individual commands are isolated and unaware of each other and possibly maintained by other people." (tadasv123)

Example GitHub Template

https://github.com/rwxrob/bonzai-template

Design Considerations

• Promote high-level package library API calls over Cmd bloat. Code belongs in package libraries, not Cmds. While Bonzai allows for rapid applications development by putting everything initially in Cmd Methods, Cmds are most designed for documentation and completion, not heavy Method implementations. Eventually, most Method implementations should be moved into their own package libraries, perhaps even in the same Go module. Cmds should never be communicating with each other directly. While the idea of adding a Channel attribute was intriguing, it quickly became clear that doing so would promote too much code and tight coupling --- even with channels --- between specific commands. Cmds should be very light. In fact, most Cmds should assign their Method directly from one matching the Method function signature in a callable, high-level library.

• Only bash completion planned. Zsh, Powershell, and Fish have no equivalent to complete -C (which allows any executable to provide its own completion) This forces inferior dependencies on overly verbose external "completer" scripts written in only those languages for those specific shells. This dependency completely negates any possibility of providing modular completers and composable commands that carry their own completion logic. This one objective fact alone should give every pause before opting to use one of these inferior shells for their command line interactions. Bonzai commands leverage this best-of-breed completion functionality of bash to provide an unlimited number of completion methods and combinations. The equivalent implementations, perhaps as an export collected from all composed commands providing their shell equivalent of completion scripts, would be preposterously large (even though kubectl requires 12637 lines of bash just for its basic completion). Bonzai uses Go itself to manage that completion --- drawing on a rich collection of completers included in the standard Bonzai module --- and provides documented shortcut aliases when completion is not available (h|help, for example).

• Bonzai commands may default to shell.Cmd or help.Cmd These provide help information and optional interactive assistance including tab completion in runtime environments that do not have complete -C foo foo enabled.

• One major use case is to replace shell scripts in "dot files" collections. By creating a cmd subdirectory of a dot files repo a multi-call Bonzai command named cmd can be easily maintained and added to just as quickly as any shell script. This has the added bonus of allowing others to quickly add one of your little commands with just a simple import (for example, import github.com/rwxrob/dot/cmd and then cmd.Isosec) from their own cmd monoliths. This also enables the fastest possible prototyping of code that would otherwise require significant, problematic mocks. Developers can work out the details of a thing just as fast as with shell scripting --- but with the power of all the Go standard library --- and then factor out their favorites as they grow into their own Bonzai command repos. This approach keeps "Go on the brain" (instead of having to port a bunch of bash later) and promotes the massive benefits of rapid applications development the fullest extent.

• Use either foo.Cmd or cmd.Foo convention. People may decide to put all their Bonzai commands into a single cmd package or to put each command into its own package. Both are perfectly acceptable and allow the developer making the import to alias the packages as needed using Go's excellent package import design.

Style Guidelines

• Everything through go fmt or equiv, no exceptions
• In Vim set textwidth=72 (not 80 to line numbers fit)
• Use /* */ for package documentation comment, // elsewhere
• Smallest possible names for given scope while still clear
• Favor additional packages (possibly in internal) over long names
• Package globals that will be used a lot can be single capital
• Must be good reason to use more than 4 character pkg name
• Avoid unnecessary comments

Acknowledgements

The https://twitch.tv/rwxrob community has been constantly involved with the development of this project, making suggestions about everything from my use of init, to the name "bonzai". While all their contributions are too numerous to name specifically, they more than deserve a huge thank you here.

Legal

Copyright 2022 Robert S. Muhlestein (mailto:rob@rwx.gg)
SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0

"Bonzai" and "bonzai" are legal trademarks of Robert S. Muhlestein but can be used freely to refer to the Bonzai project https://github.com/rwxrob/bonzai without limitation. To avoid potential developer confusion, intentionally using these trademarks to refer to other projects --- free or proprietary --- is prohibited.