Namespacing thor commands in a standalone ruby executable - ruby

Question

When calling thor commands on the command line, the methods are namespaced by their module/class structure, e.g.
class App < Thor
desc 'hello', 'prints hello'
def hello
puts 'hello'
end
end
would be run with the command
thor app:hello
However, if you make that self executable by putting
App.start
at the bottom you can run the command like:
app hello
Is there any way to namespace those commands? So that you could call, for example
app say:hello
app say:goodbye

Answer 1

Another way of doing this is to use register:
class CLI < Thor
register(SubTask, 'sub', 'sub <command>', 'Description.')
end
class SubTask < Thor
desc "bar", "..."
def bar()
# ...
end
end
CLI.start
Now - assuming your executable is called foo - you can call:
$ foo sub bar
In the current thor version (0.15.0.rc2) there is a bug though, which causes the help texts to skip the namespace of sub commands:
$ foo sub
Tasks:
foo help [COMMAND] # Describe subcommands or one specific subcommand
foo bar #
You can fix that by overriding self.banner and explicitly setting the namespace.
class SubTask < Thor
namespace :sub
def bar ...
def self.banner(task, namespace = true, subcommand = false)
"#{basename} #{task.formatted_usage(self, true, subcommand)}"
end
end
The second parameter of formatted_usage is the only difference to the original implemtation of banner. You can also do this once and have other sub command thor classes inherit from SubTask. Now you get:
$ foo sub
Tasks:
foo sub help [COMMAND] # Describe subcommands or one specific subcommand
foo sub bar #
Hope that helps.

Answer 2

This is one way with App as the default namespace (quite hacky though):
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require "rubygems"
require "thor"
class Say < Thor
# ./app say:hello
desc 'hello', 'prints hello'
def hello
puts 'hello'
end
end
class App < Thor
# ./app nothing
desc 'nothing', 'does nothing'
def nothing
puts 'doing nothing'
end
end
begin
parts = ARGV[0].split(':')
namespace = Kernel.const_get(parts[0].capitalize)
parts.shift
ARGV[0] = parts.join
namespace.start
rescue
App.start
end
Or, also not ideal:
define_method 'say:hello'