How to conditionally add flags to shell scripts?

Question

I want to run a command inside my bash script with or without a -v flag depending on if the environment variable $VERBOSE is defined. Something like this:

Answer 1

For readability, consider using an array to store the arguments.

args=(
  -m "$MONGO_HOST"
  -t "$NEO_URI"
  -stdout
)
if [[ -v VERBOSE ]]; then
    args+=(-v)
fi
/usr/local/bin/mongo-connector "${args[@]}"