Bash autocompletion for Geth

[willianpaixao]

Rationale

Why should this feature exist?

Geth has a huge number of commands and options to be passed. Some commands need arguments and sometimes it's complicated to say which order you need to provide.

A Bash completion script would give hints of what can be expected when pressing TAB.

What are the use-cases?

Every Geth developer or beginner that often uses Geth's CLI.

Implementation

Do you have ideas regarding the implementation of this feature?
Two approaches can be taken:

1. A new geth command is created, eg. geth completion, that dumps a completion script. When installing Geth, the uses adds source <(geth completion) to their ~/.bashrc or runs geth completion > /etc/bash_completion.d/geth.
2. A completion script is written and included in this repository. Then the Geth documentation will guide the user to download the script and place it under ~/.bash_completion.d/geth or /etc/bash_completion.d/geth. In this option, no Go source code will be changed.

Are you willing to implement this feature?
Yes.

References

• How to create a Bash completion script
• An Introduction to Programmable Completion
• Programmable Completion Builtins

[edualb]

I have been working on this Feature Request and I figured out that geth uses this library to manage the geth cli:

gopkg.in/urfave/cli.v1

This library explains how could we do that with a bash script. I tried it yesterday and worked 🎉 . However it is necessary to run a script depend on your platform:

• Linux / MacOS - https://github.com/urfave/cli/blob/master/autocomplete/bash_autocomplete
• Windows - https://github.com/urfave/cli/blob/master/autocomplete/powershell_autocomplete.ps1

For that, I have been thinking include a tutorial page in gh-page explaning how you can configure your autocomplete depend on your platform. What you think guys?

[ligi]

I just tried it out on linux with bash and it is actually really nice - thanks for bringing this up!

prepared it with #24313 - but would really appreciate if you do the tutorial as you offered.

[edualb]

@ligi Yeah, of course! I have some issues to solve this week but I will be available next week. If someone else would like to implement it this week be free, however, if no one implement it until there, I'll do that 😉

[ligi]

@edualb still interested in writing something?

[edualb]

@ligi Yeah! I am, but I have faced a problem when I tried to include a new page... I am on my job now and in the end of my shift I will put my issue here... If you can help I would be glad for that 💙

[ligi]

ya - LMK what problem you faced and I will try to find a way around it

[edualb]

@ligi sorry for my delay 🤐

I realized that my docker had an old image and my Bash Autocomplete tutorial never worked hehe I just purge this image and tried again, everything worked well 🎉

[fjl]

We now ship bash completions in the Ubuntu package.