Tutorial: Building a Multi-Command CLI Tool

An intermediate tutorial that expands to multiple commands and subcommands, illustrating Spectre.Console.Cli's support for complex CLI structures

An intermediate tutorial that expands to multiple commands and subcommands, illustrating Spectre.Console.Cli's support for complex CLI structures. Using a real-world scenario (e.g. a simple version control CLI or a file utility), it guides the user to create several commands with a shared theme. The tutorial covers:

  • Defining multiple CommandSettings classes (some possibly inheriting from a common base for shared options).
  • Creating corresponding Command classes for each (e.g. AddCommand, CommitCommand, etc.) with their Execute logic.
  • Composing the commands into a hierarchy using app.Configure(config => config.AddBranch(...)...) for subcommands (for example, a top-level "add" command with subcommands "package" and "reference").
  • Running and testing the CLI with various arguments (app.exe add package --version 1.0). This tutorial emphasizes how to structure the code cleanly via composition and shows the automatically generated help output for the commands. By completing it, the reader will understand how to build and organize a CLI with multiple verbs and nested commands.