Pure-Rust Git, no git binary
go-tool-base’s VCS support has two halves that get confused for one. One half talks to forge APIs (GitHub, GitLab) for releases and pull requests. The other talks to the .git directory on disk: clone, history, diff, …
Tags
14 pages
rust-tool-base
Secrets that scrub themselves from RAM
A while ago I worked out where a CLI should keep your API key: env var, OS keychain, or, grudgingly, a literal in the config file. That answers where the secret lives. It says nothing about what happens to it once it’s …
Supporting a provider, or actually using it
If your CLI tool talks to an AI model, you don’t want to hard-wire one vendor. So you reach for a single client interface over several providers, which is the right call. The trap is the next step: build that interface …
Errors without an error handler
In the porting post I said go-tool-base’s error handler was one of the bits that didn’t survive the move to Rust, and promised to come back to it. Here’s the come-back. The short version is that Rust hands you, for free, …
Two kinds of feature flag
go-tool-base has feature flags: switches that decide which built-in commands are live in a given run. rust-tool-base has those too. But it also has a second, completely separate kind of flag, and the difference between …
A framework that contains no unsafe
“It’s written in Rust” gets thrown around as if it were a memory-safety guarantee. It mostly isn’t. Rust is memory-safe by default, which is a wonderful thing, but the unsafe keyword exists precisely so any crate, any …
Reloading config without a restart
A config file changes. Someone edits a setting, rotates a credential, flips a feature flag. How does the running process find out? For most processes the answer is blunt: it doesn’t, until you restart it. For a …
Waivers with an expiry date
A vulnerability scanner gives you a yes or a no. Is there a known advisory on a path you actually use? Yes, or no. That’s genuinely useful, and you should run one. But it’s a snapshot, taken on the day you ask, and …
A builder that won't compile if you forget a field
go-tool-base configures things with functional options, and if you forget a required one, the best case is a runtime failure and the worst case is an empty value sailing silently into everything downstream. Most builder …
Registering commands without life before main
I ended the last post promising to show how a Rust command registers itself when the language flatly refuses to run any of your code before main(). This is that post, and it’s a lovely example of reaching the same …
