32

I'm looking for a way to create a command-line thor app that will run a default method without any arguments. I fiddled with Thor's default_method option, but still requires that I pass in an argument. I found a similar case where someone wanted to run a CLI Thor task with arguments but without a task name.

I'd like to run a task with no task name and no arguments. Is such a thing possible?

Community
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dhulihan
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    I think you can also use Thor::Group, see [here](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7277604/thor-executable-ignore-task-name/8362300#8362300) – timfjord Jul 18 '12 at 15:46

3 Answers3

64

It seems the proper Thor-way to do this is using default_task:

class Commands < Thor
  desc "whatever", "The default task to run when no command is given"
  def whatever
    ...
  end
  default_task :whatever
end
Commands.start

If for whatever reason that isn't what you need, you should be able to do something like

class Commands < Thor
  ...
end

if ARGV.empty?
  # Perform the default, it doesn't have to be a Thor task
  Commands.new.whatever
else
  # Start Thor as usual
  Commands.start
end
Jakob S
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6

Kind of hackish, but where there's only one defined action anyway, I just prepended the action name to the ARGV array that gets passed in:

class GitTranslate < Thor
  desc "translate <repo-name>", "Obtain a full url given only a repo name"
  option :bitbucket, type: :boolean, aliases: 'b' 
  def translate(repo)
    if options[:bitbucket]
      str = "freedomben/#{repo}.git"
      puts "SSH:   git@bitbucket.org:#{str}"
      puts "HTTPS: https://freedomben@bitbucket.org/#{str}"
    else
      str = "FreedomBen/#{repo}.git"
      puts "SSH:   git@github.com:#{str}"
      puts "HTTPS: https://github.com/#{str}"
    end 
  end 
end

Then where I start the class by passing in ARGV:

GitTranslate.start(ARGV.dup.unshift("translate"))
Freedom_Ben
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    No reason to become hackish :) Jacob's [answer](https://stackoverflow.com/a/7253594/3449673) is the way to go. Just set a `default_task :translate` and you are done. – thutt Aug 17 '17 at 14:50
0

While it is a little hackish, I solved a similar problem by catching the option as the argument itself:

argument :name

def init
 if name === '--init'
   file_name = ".blam"
   template('templates/blam.tt', file_name) unless File.exists?(file_name)
   exit(0)
 end
end

When running in a Thor::Group this method is executed before others and lets me trick the program into responding to an option like argument.

This code is from https://github.com/neverstopbuilding/blam.