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Tanzu CLI Development

This section provides useful information about developing or building the tanzu-cli project.

Building

The default make target to update dependencies, build, test, and lint the CLI:

make all

However, for day-to-day development, the following individual make targets provide more flexibility:

make build
make test
make lint
make gomod

Source Code Changes

Default Directory Locations

The location of the directories used by the CLI are:

  1. to store plugin binaries: <XDG_DATA_HOME>/tanzu-cli
  2. to store the plugin catalog as well as the plugin inventory DB cache: $HOME/.cache/tanzu
  3. to store configuration files: $HOME/.config/tanzu
  4. to store the telemetry DB: $HOME/.config/tanzu-cli-telemetry

Source Code Structure

cmd/plugin/: code location for various plugins

Running make build-all will build the CLI and any plugins in this repository unlike make build which only builds the CLI.

cmd/plugin/builder: code location for the builder plugin

Tests

To run unit tests within the repository:

make test

To run e2e tests for the repository:

make e2e-cli-core

Debugging

By default the CLI is built without debug symbols to reduce its binary size; this has the side-effect of preventing the use of a debugger towards the built binary. However, when using an IDE, a different binary is used, one built by the IDE, and therefore the debugger can be used directly from the IDE.

If you require using a debugger directly on a CLI binary, you have to build a binary that includes the debug symbols. You can build such a binary by using TANZU_CLI_ENABLE_DEBUG=1 along with your build command.

Centralized Discovery of Plugins

The Tanzu CLI uses a system of plugins to provide functionality to interact with different Tanzu products. To install a plugin, the CLI uses an OCI discovery source, which contains the inventory of plugins. For the implementation details of the OCI discovery solution, please refer to the Centralized Discovery document.

Deprecation of existing functionality

Any changes aimed to remove functionality in the CLI (e.g. commands, command flags) have to follow the deprecation policy. For more details on the deprecation policy and process please refer to the Deprecation document.

Shell Completion Support

The Tanzu CLI supports shell completion for a series of shells as provided by the Cobra project. Shell completion for commands and flag names is automatically handled by Cobra. However, shell completion for arguments and flag values must be coded in the Tanzu CLI itself.

All core CLI command and flags should provide proper shell completion for the arguments and flag values they accept. Whenever a new command or flag is added the appropriate shell completion code must also be added. For examples, please refer to existing ValidArgsFunction function implementations and calls to RegisterFlagCompletionFunc().

ActiveHelp Support

ActiveHelp are messages printed through shell completion as the program is being used. The Tanzu CLI provides ActiveHelp in certain situations which should be maintained. For examples, please refer to calls to cobra.AppendActiveHelp(). The following simple guidelines should be respected:

  1. when all arguments for a command have been provided on the command line, the functions noMoreCompletions or activeHelpNoMoreArgs should be used to provide ActiveHelp to indicate to the user no more arguments are accepted,
  2. whenever a command accepts an argument or a flag accepts a value, but that the shell completion code is unable to provide suggestions, an ActiveHelp message should be provided to guide the user,
  3. when the shell completion code is unable to provide suggestions due to an error with user input (e.g, an invalid plugin name), an ActiveHelp message should be added to guide the user in realizing what the problem is.