28 pages

rust-tool-base

The Rust counterpart to go-tool-base, and deliberately not a straight port. Rather than copy the Go version wholesale, it reimagines the same idea through Rust idioms and off-the-shelf crates, while keeping a common signature and feature set so the two feel familiar if you switch between them. The same streamlined developer experience, done the Rust way.

Repository: gitlab.com/phpboyscout/rust-tool-base Docs: rtb.phpboyscout.uk

The scaffolder that won't hand you code that doesn't compile

Most scaffolders hand you a stub. You run the generate command, you get a file with the right shape and a // TODO: implement where the actual work goes, and the rest is on you. That’s fine, it’s upfront, and it’s most of …

Which CLI library should you start with?

You’ve decided to build a command-line tool. Good. And before you’ve written a single line of the thing it’s actually meant to do, you hit a decision that feels far more permanent than it should: which library parses the …

A flag is not a setting

I was reviewing a change to rust-tool-base’s scaffolder when a word stopped me dead. rtb generate config-field. I couldn’t have told you why in that first second… I looked at it and just knew it was wrong. The verb there …

Three traps release-plz sets for a Rust workspace

I wrote up the two days I lost releasing a seventeen-crate workspace to crates.io as a war story, wrong turns and all. This is the other half: the field guide, so you don’t have to lose the same two days. release-plz is …

Same config, two answers

Let me confess a small heresy first, because it’s the reason any of this happened. After a career spent as a branching man, gitflow, gitlabflow, a tidy develop branch and a careful dance of merges, I’ve come round to …

From allow_failure to blocking

There’s a special kind of CI job that everyone on a team quietly learns to ignore: the one marked allow_failure: true. It runs, it goes red, the pipeline goes green anyway, and after the third time you stop looking at …

Pure-Rust Git, no git binary

go-tool-base’s VCS support has two halves that get confused for one. One half talks to forge APIs (GitHub, GitLab) for releases and pull requests. The other talks to the .git directory on disk: clone, history, diff, …

clap's global flag, except in a passthrough subtree

--output json worked everywhere. On the top-level command, on every ordinary subcommand, wherever the user fancied putting it. Then it stopped working in exactly one place, and of course it was the subcommand I’d been …

Secrets that scrub themselves from RAM

A while ago I worked out where a CLI should keep your API key: env var, OS keychain, or, grudgingly, a literal in the config file. That answers where the secret lives. It says nothing about what happens to it once it’s …

Two telemetry events, one mangled line

A line in a log file that no parser would touch. Not a wrong value, not a missing field. Half of one telemetry event spliced into the middle of another, like two people typing into the same text box at once. Which, it …