Golang: Using user defined type as flag in terminal applications

As we saw in the previous article the flag package gives us flexibility to develop command-line applications that suite our needs.

In this post, I will show how you can develop a flag argument for user defined type.

Lets develop application that should be executed in the following ways:

healthcheck -url=http://www.example.com,http://mail.example.com/inbox
healthcheck -url=http://www.example.com -url=http://mail.example.com/inbox

We can use the predefined url.URL struct in net/url package as type of the arguments that are expected. Nevertheless, there is not predefined function in flag package that instaciate that kind of flag for us.

Forthunately, it provides an easy way to extend that by using flag.Var function. It creates a flag for any type that obey flag.Value interface:

type Value interface {
    String()
    Set(string) error
}

Lets declare the type UrlFlag:

type UrlFlag struct {
    urls []*url.URL
}

Then you should define String() function that converts this struct as a string:

func (arr *UrlFlag) String() string {
    return fmt.Sprint(arr.urls)
}

The Set(string) is called by flag.Parse function. It initializes this flag from command line arguments. In our case, we will expect comma-separated list of values:

func (arr *UrlFlag) Set(value string) error {
    urls := strings.Split(value, ",")
    for _, item := range urls {
    	if parsedUrl, err := url.Parse(item); err != nil {
    		return err
    	} else {
    		arr.urls = append(arr.urls, parsedUrl)
    	}
    }
    return nil
}

Note that if you do not want to allow multiple occurance of this flag, you should return an error if the flag is already set:

func (arr *UrlFlag) Set(value string) error {
    if len(arr.urls) > 0 {
    	return fmt.Errorf("The url flag is already set")
    }

    urls := strings.Split(value, ",")
    for _, item := range urls {
    	if parsedUrl, err := url.Parse(item); err != nil {
    		return err
    	} else {
    		arr.urls = append(arr.urls, parsedUrl)
    	}
    }
    return nil
}

Eventually, you should declare the flag in the main function:

var arg UrlFlag
flag.Var(&arg, "url", "URL comma-separated list")

and parse it:

flag.Parse()

for _, item := range arg.Urls() {
	fmt.Printf("scheme: %s url: %s path: %s\n", item.Scheme, item.Host, item.Path)
}

You can get the sample from here.