Using Cobra CLI in HTTP services

#1

Hey everyone, I have a question that has been bugging me for some time now and have yet to find a satisfactory answer. Hopefully, someone can shed some light here:

I see that in many REST apps, for example, people are using the cobra library. I’m a bit confuzzled by this since in essence that’s a CLI library and in my mind, there’s no connection between CLI and a backend HTTP service for instance. For instance, in Java, I haven’t seen a similar pattern. What am I missing here? Why the need for the CLI?

#2

What is your question? “Why is everyone writing command line interfaces to web services?”

#3

Yup, exactly. Why is this the pattern here? Is there a reason for this?

#4

Command line interfaces to web services are easy to automate/script. I’m not sure if it’s specific to Go; I don’t see it as much with C#, but there are plenty of Python scripts that do the same.

#5

I’m not sure I completely understand what you mean by “easy to automate/script”. Could you expand on that?

I was looking at this article which explains that cobra is being used for passing envars as command line args: https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/09/06/creating-a-microservice-boilerplate-in-go/. Is this why we are using cobra?

#6

I misunderstood your initial post. I missed the word “backend” and I thought you were asking about creating client REST apps with command line interfaces. Now I’m not sure what you mean about there being no connection between the CLI and a backend HTTP service because for *nix, I think it’s extremely common to write services as command line interfaces. If not as a command line application, how would you run a web application server? With a GUI?