Accessing parent options from subcommand

[marc0s]

Are parent's options available to subcommands? In my tests, they aren't.

It would be nice to have them available. In my case is for configuring the remote server my CLI app needs to connect to, so I have not to define the same options in every subcommand.

# ./cmd
#!/usr/bin/env node

var program = require("commander");
program.version("0.0.1")
  .option("-H, --host <host>", "server host")
  .command("sub", "subcommand");
program.parse(process.argv);
console.log(program.host);

# ./cmd-sub
#!/usr/bin/env node

var program = require("commander");
program.version("0.0.1");
program.parse(process.argv);
console.log(program.host);

And if you run them:

$ ./cmd --host localhost 
localhost
$ ./cmd-sub --host localhost 
error: unknown option `--host'

Any trick to get them from the subcommand or is just not possible?

Thanks.

[thethomaseffect]

That's not the best idea, subcommands should behave like independent programs. .option and .command are just methods of a commander object, why not make a function that takes a commander object, runs the methods on it and returns the object with it's new methods. This way you can share your --host option and more with as many subcommands as you want. I've never tried this (never had subcommands that had all that much in common) but it sounds okay in theory.

[marc0s]

Thanks for the tip!

[thethomaseffect]

Let me know if it works :)

[marc0s]

It did :)

I just create a basic commander object with the common options inside a function that returns it and use that function to initialize each of the commander objects I need, so they're all already populated with the common options.

Thanks!

[b4dnewz]

hi @marc0s, can you share some code or example of how you did? just for the records, thankx

[pburgmer]

@b4dnewz I did it like this

const command = commander.command('merge');

command
      .description('foo')
      .option('--bar', 'really?', false)
      .action(async (args) => { });

addLoggingOption(command);

and

function addLoggingOption(command) {
  command
    .option('--log-level <level>', 'print log messages of given level and above only', 'info')
    .option('--verbose', 'set log level to debug')
    .option('--quiet', 'set log level to warn');
}

[shadowspawn]

Opened poll on possible enhancements to global options: #1551

[shadowspawn]

Opened a draft PR for .addCommonOption() #1670