Inconsistent Behaviours in APISIX CLI

[kayx23]

Description

Relevant file: https://github.com/apache/apisix/blob/master/apisix/cli/ops.lua

1. Command -h option

A help menu for apisix start is printed if I run apisix start -h:

However, -h does not seem to work for the other CLI commands, which is unexpected from a user perspective.

For example, -h is ignored in the following examples with other commands:

2. --verbose option

apisix/apisix/cli/ops.lua

Line 801 in 9993bbb

parser:flag("--verbose", "show init_etcd debug information")

• This should accept -v as well.
• apisix init_etcd --verbose did not print additional debug info for me, compared with the output of apisix init_etcd. Is this how it's used? If so, can others share their results?

Environment

• APISIX version: 3.3.0
• Operating system: CentOS 8

[Revolyssup]

@lingsamuel I can take this

[kayx23]

any update?

[Revolyssup]

@kayx23 This got lost. Thanks for reminder. Putting this into backlog and will process it.

[Revolyssup]

Only start supports flags and arguments that is why flag parsing is not done on other commands as there are no flags(even help) on other commands like stop and quit. We can maybe still add -h on other commands where it will just output a message like stop: stops the running APISIX instance. Though the commands themselves are self explanatory.

@kayx23 What do you think? Should we add -h on other commands as well for consistency or keep things the way they are right now and add this to the doc for simplicity?

[Revolyssup]

@kayx23 For the 2nd point, --verbose is to be used with apisix start and not apisix init_etcd. Example screenshot attached below.

For the 1st point, flag parsing is not consistent right now as it's not done in commands other than start. I think it's okay to have these flags local to start command as they are of little use in other commands. Either you can add this in the docs that the flags are not global or if this causes confusion with users then we can make -h flag global.

[kayx23]

Thanks for the help. One last thing, should there be a -v as well, shorthand for --verbose? Similar to-h to --help and -c to --config.

[Revolyssup]

-v a

Yep, this suggestion makes sense to me. I will create a PR for this. Although, since -v sometimes is also used for --version, the author may have decided to be verbose about it.