Troll.opt

A powerful-but-simple command line parser in CoffeeScript for Node.js apps inspired by William Morgan's awesome Trollop gem for Ruby.

Troll.opt allows you to define and parse command line args in one simple definition. One line per opt: that's all you need. No chaining long series of commands together, no multiline parsing definitions.

A simple single option defintion looks like this:

(new Troll()).options(function(t) {
  t.opt("word", "something to talk about", {default: 'cake'})
});

Or, a slightly more complicated definition that takes three different arguments and defines a help banner:

Troll = require('troll-opt').Troll

opts = (new Troll()).options(function(troll) {
  troll.banner('Totally rad app that does something cool');
  troll.opt('awesome', 'Turn on the awesome', { default: true });
  troll.opt('name',    'The name of the application', { type: 'string', required: true });
  troll.opt('add',     'Add some more awesome', { short: 'd', default: true });
});

This in turn will supply the following help document when the calling application is invoked with the help flag: app.js --help.

Usage: app.js [options]
  A great program that everyone should run every day
       --add, -d: Add some more awesome
   --awesome, -a: Turn on the awesome (default: true)
  --name, -n <s>: The name of the application (required)
          --help: Display this text

If we pass that a command line like:

$ ./test.js --name="something" --add

or:

$ ./test.js --name something --add

or:

$ ./test.js -n something -d

If we then inspect the contents of opts as defined above we see:

{ name: 'something', add: true, awesome: true }

Features

Troll.opt, like Trollop, gives you a lot of win for not much work. Here are some of the things you get for free:

• Automatic assignment of defaults
• Automatic assignment of short flags (e.g. -n for --now)
• Automatic checking for required args
• Automatic type conversion for basic types
• Multiple command line syntaxes (getopt short, getopt long with and without =)
• Nice looking usage output

Future Additions

• Conversion of dashes in argument names to underscores
• Trollop 2.0-like --no-option and --option handling for flags