Why design global options need to be before subcommands?

[lizhifengones]

Global options need to appear before subcommands, not anywhere, why are they designed this way?

This is not the same as spf13/cobra. In urfave/cli, global options are not visible in subcommands.

I like cobra's global options, but urfave/cli is simpler, that's why I use urfave/cli. Hope someone can explain my doubts...

# ./bin/test-cmd --debug aaa  (work)
# ./bin/test-cmd aaa --debug
2022/05/08 14:23:57 flag provided but not defined: -debug

[fjl]

I have to say, I find this extremely annoying as well. We use urfave/cli in go-ethereum, and are kind of stuck with it because we have so much code relying on it.

It would be nice to be able to tweak this behavior using e.g.

var app = cli.App{
    ...
    AllowAllFlagsInSubcommands: true,
}

and the implementation of it would be straightforward, just construct the flag set a bit differently.

[tonglil]

Funny, just stumbled upon this UX issue today as well. Was expecting app.Flags options to show up with every subcommand's help as well as a GLOBAL OPTIONS or something.

Cobra does this with local vs persistent flags: https://github.com/spf13/cobra/blob/master/user_guide.md#persistent-flags

Likely related:

• https://github.com/urfave/cli/issues/734
• https://github.com/urfave/cli/issues/585
• https://github.com/urfave/cli/issues/427
• https://github.com/urfave/cli/issues/1205
• https://github.com/urfave/cli/pull/1245

I've also found that the help text seems to be fairly contrived with 3 different ways of triggering them and all with slightly different text when in my opinon they should all be the same..

Group 1 cli.AppHelpTemplate:

root -h
root --help
root help
root cmd help -> shows "GLOBAL OPTIONS" when it should show "COMMAND OPTIONS", but also used by `root help`

Group 2 cli.CommandHelpTemplate:

root help cmd

Group 3 cli.SubcommandHelpTemplate:

root cmd -h
root cmd --help

[Icarus9913]

Yeah, as @tonglil said. It would be nice to show Global options through the whole cmd cli phase from top to bottom. For users to get understand the global options better.

[yxxhero]

any update?

[dearchap]

While this is a nice feature to have it is non trivial as it means that the entire flag parse needs to change. This has been discussed endlessly in the past. If you can provide a PR we can gladly comment and incorporate

[dearchap]

Duplicate of #1113