Refactor the user guide to avoid to use the `init()` func

[enrichman]

The user guide is linked from the main README, and I guess it's where most of the people will just land for a quick copy-paste.

The guide is showing how to setup a command with the init() func, but I think it's a bad approach (and also looking for related issues I'm not the only one):

• https://github.com/spf13/cobra/issues/1335
• https://github.com/spf13/cobra/issues/1336
• https://github.com/spf13/cobra/issues/1599
• https://github.com/spf13/cobra-cli/issues/12
• • https://github.com/spf13/cobra/issues/1614

One of the main problem of this is that is not possible to handle any errors, so I would like to know if it was feasible to at least update the user guide to show a more idiomatic approach (i.e. the BindPFlag func err is ignored, and the errcheck linter complains about it).

Are you willing to accept a PR on a different style? :slightly_smiling_face:

[johnSchnake]

Absolutely; as the other issues make clear we are on board with those kind of changes. My only comment would be to try and make it so that those changes (boilerplate, docs, etc) all change in a similar fashion to avoid confusion. If you want to try and tackle multiple parts of that then even better.

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[asphaltbuffet]

nope

[red8888]

Just want to add this is kind of tangentially related to documenting or changing the default templates to setup unit testing correctly: https://github.com/spf13/cobra/issues/770

I'm new to cobra and I am trying the approach of wrapping the command in a function (common approach), but the template includes init().

I assumed init() was required and it took me some googling to find out 1. I don't need init() and 2. I shouldn't even be using it:

func RootCmd() *cobra.Command {
	return &cobra.Command{
		.....
	}
}

func init() {
	cobra.OnInitialize(initConfig)
	// What do I do about rootCmd in init() now that its a func not a var?
	rootCmd.PersistentFlags().StringVar(&cfgFile, "config", "", "config file (default is $HOME/.dirk.yaml)")
	rootCmd.Flags().BoolP("toggle", "t", false, "Help message for toggle")
}

[sheldonhull]

Not sure if useful but I avoided mostly init() in this projct: https://github.com/sheldonhull/az-pr/blob/e23d6b7f4d500310e938e51e88e5ba553b0edf5b/cmd/root.go#L45

Still some stuff to cleanup (quick side project), so maybe that can get you started until someone else provides more detail.