Add `limactl list --filter` option

[jandubois]

After implementing the --yq option I found that I would like to have a --filter EXPR option, that would be equivalent to --yq 'select(EXPR)'.

This alone doesn't seem worthwhile, but I would want --filter to also work with --format table and --format '{{GO-TMPL}}'.

So you could do something like this:

❯ limactl ls --filter '.status == "Running"'
NAME       STATUS     SSH                VMTYPE    ARCH       CPUS    MEMORY    DISK      DIR
docker     Running    127.0.0.1:60763    vz        aarch64    4       4GiB      100GiB    ~/.lima/docker
qemu       Running    127.0.0.1:63754    qemu      aarch64    4       4GiB      100GiB    ~/.lima/qemu

The --filter option can be specified multiple times, so you could have a limactl-ps plugin that runs the command above (with "$@"), and then use it like this:

❯ limactl ps -f '.config.vmType == "vz"'
NAME       STATUS     SSH                VMTYPE    ARCH       CPUS    MEMORY    DISK      DIR
docker     Running    127.0.0.1:60763    vz        aarch64    4       4GiB      100GiB    ~/.lima/docker

[olamilekan000]

can you assign to me

[AkihiroSuda]

The --filter option can be specified multiple times

Can't we just support --filter "EXPR1 && EXPR2" ?

[jandubois]

Can't we just support --filter "EXPR1 && EXPR2" ?

The filter expression would need to be using yq syntax, so you have to use and instead of &&:

❯ l ls --yq 'select(.status == "Running" and .config.vmType == "vz")' -q
docker

But that doesn't unlock the use in a plugin I showed above. You can do this with --yq (once #4006 is merged):

❯ cat ~/bin/limactl-ps
#!/bin/sh
limactl ls --yq 'select(.status == "Running")' "$@"

❯ l ps -q
docker
qemu

❯ l ps -q --yq 'select(.config.vmType == "vz")'
docker

You should be able to do the same kind of composable filtering with --filter and the default --format table. With --yq your output can only be JSON or YAML.

So it should look like this:

❯ cat ~/bin/limactl-ps
#!/bin/sh
limactl ls --filter '.status == "Running"' "$@"

❯ l ps
NAME       STATUS     SSH                VMTYPE    ARCH       CPUS    MEMORY    DISK      DIR
docker     Running    127.0.0.1:60763    vz        aarch64    4       4GiB      100GiB    ~/.lima/docker
qemu       Running    127.0.0.1:63754    qemu      aarch64    4       4GiB      100GiB    ~/.lima/qemu

❯ l ps -f '.config.vmType == "vz"'
NAME       STATUS     SSH                VMTYPE    ARCH       CPUS    MEMORY    DISK      DIR
docker     Running    127.0.0.1:60763    vz        aarch64    4       4GiB      100GiB    ~/.lima/docker

And then you could still combine this with --format json if you wanted JSON output. This makes the plugin much more versatile.

[jandubois]

Off topic, but just to demonstrate how this plugin automatically supports --help too:

❯ l ps --help | head -1
List instances of Lima.

Ideally you would want to include a description that explains the difference to plain ls, but this is better than nothing as a default.