Future of assert_cli

[killercup]

@epage asked in #40 (comment):

I'm curious, what do you see needing done before moving this to 1.0? While I should get back to my regularly schedule project, I would like to also help work towards more crates hitting 1.0.

Good question! I'd like to make the arg parsing a bit leaner (cf. #25 and #32) and maybe improve the error output (#17, #18, #30).

My general goal is to make a library that makes writing tests like these easy and fun. It'll probably involve generating some test boilerplate code, and I'm not entirely sure what I want that API to look like. I'm not even sure if that's in scope for assert_cli. What do you think?

EDIT

The building blocks for assert_cli 1.0 are

• https://github.com/assert-rs/assert_fs/
• https://github.com/assert-rs/assert_cmd/
• https://github.com/assert-rs/predicates-rs/
• https://github.com/Freyskeyd/environment ?

[killercup]

Pinging some people who used assert_cli in their projects (found using Github search):

We are thinking about doing a 1.0 release and would love to hear your opinion on the crate and ideas for its future!

• @livioribeiro who used it for cargo-readme integration tests
• @bjgill who updated cargo-edit to assert_cli 0.4
• @mattgathu who quite recently used assert_cli in rget
• @jxson who uses it in some tests of to-directory

[mattgathu]

About future ideas, I have been wondering how feasible it is to test for colored output?

If my CLI binary prints out colored text, can I test this?

What are your thoughts on this.

[epage]

About future ideas, I have been wondering how feasible it is to test for colored output? If my CLI binary prints out colored text, can I test this?

Most programs detect if they are outputting to a console and don't print color if they are. Some have a "force color" option.

So either we'd need to figure out how to fake being a console or clients need to have a force color option and set it.

When forced, I assume color just shows up in stdout as weird characters. Can you just manually enter those characters in to test it? Do you have a proposal for what an API might look like for more advanced color testing?

[epage]

We've started the major shift to assert_cli 1.0. assert_cmd is the spiritual successor to what assert_cli today. We plan to turn assert_cli into a higher level CLI testing crate like waltz tests.

The building blocks for assert_cli 1.0 are

• https://github.com/assert-rs/assert_fs/
• https://github.com/assert-rs/assert_cmd/
• https://github.com/assert-rs/predicates-rs/
• https://github.com/Freyskeyd/environment ?

The bad: it will probably take longer to stablize assert_cli because we need to re-evaluate the design and play with ideas

The good: the smaller pieces should be a lot easier to stablize.

[epage]

Started looking at how others test CLIs and for python, I only found https://bitheap.org/cram/