Command Line Interface Guidelines

An open-source guide to help you write better command-line programs, taking traditional UNIX principles and updating them for the modern day.

This is the source code for the guide. To read it, go to clig.dev.

Join us on Discord if you want to discuss the guide, or just chat about CLI design.

Contributing

The content of the guide lives in a single Markdown file, content/_index.md. The website is built using Hugo.

To run Hugo locally to see your changes, run:

$ brew install hugo
$ cd <path>/<to>/cli-guidelines/
$ hugo server

To view the site on an external mobile device, run:

hugo server --bind 0.0.0.0 --baseURL http://$(hostname -f):1313

The site is hosted on Cloudflare Workers as a static-assets project, built and deployed from this repo:

build.sh installs a pinned Hugo and builds the site into public/.
wrangler.toml runs build.sh and uploads public/ as the Worker's static assets. The Cloudflare deploy command is npx wrangler deploy.
public/_headers (from assets/_headers) makes Cloudflare serve /llms.txt as text/markdown.

Two zone-level Cloudflare Rules support the site (these are not part of the deploy):

a URL Rewrite rule that serves /llms.txt for requests to / sending an Accept: text/markdown header;
a Redirect rule from www.clig.dev to the apex clig.dev.

Provision or update both (idempotent) with:

$ CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN=... ./scripts/cloudflare-transform-rule.sh