How to make two thor tasks share options?

Question

With Thor one can use method_option to set the options for a particular task. To set the options for all tasks in a class one can use class_option. But what about t

Answer 1

I had the same problem and I used what N.N. answered. But I found some problems:

If you want to share more than one option as in the example, it doesn't work very well. Imagine you want to share :value between task2 and task3. You could create another shared_options or you could create an array with the shared options and access it with the shared_option name.

This works but it's verbose and hard to read. I've implemented something small to be able to share options.

Cli < Thor  
  class << self
      def add_shared_option(name, options = {})
        @shared_options = {} if @shared_options.nil?
        @shared_options[name] =  options
      end

      def shared_options(*option_names)
        option_names.each do |option_name|
          opt =  @shared_options[option_name]
          raise "Tried to access shared option '#{option_name}' but it was not previously defined" if opt.nil?
          option option_name, opt
        end
      end
    end
    #...commands 
end

This creates a hash with the option name as key, and the 'definition' (required, default, etc) as value (which is a hash). This is easily accessible afterwards.

With this, you can do the following:

require 'thor'

class Cli < Thor

  add_shared_option :type,  :type => :string, :required => true, :default => 'foo'
  add_shared_option :value, :type => :numeric

  desc 'task1', 'Task 1'
  shared_options :type
  def task1
  end

  desc 'task2', 'Task 2'
  shared_options :type, :value
  def task2
  end

  desc 'task3', 'Task 3'
  shared_options :value
  def task3
  end
end

Cli.start(ARGV)

For me it looks more readable, and if the number of commands is bigger than 3 or 4 it's a great improvement.