starbase

Application framework for building performant command line applications and developer tools.

Usage

An application uses a session based approach, where a session object contains data required for the entire application lifecycle.

Create an App, optionally setup diagnostics (miette) and tracing (tracing), and then run the application with the provided session. A mutable session is required, as the session can be mutated for each phase.

use starbase::{App, MainResult};
use crate::CustomSession;

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> MainResult {
  let app = App::default();
  app.setup_diagnostics();

  let mut session = CustomSession::default();

  app.run(&mut session, |session| async {
    // Run CLI
    Ok(())
  }).await?;

  Ok(())
}

Session

A session must implement the AppSession trait. This trait provides 4 optional methods, each representing a different phase in the application life cycle.

use starbase::{AppSession, AppResult};
use std::path::PathBuf;
use async_trait::async_trait;

#[derive(Clone)]
pub struct CustomSession {
  pub workspace_root: PathBuf,
}

#[async_trait]
impl AppSession for CustomSession {
  async fn startup(&mut self) -> AppResult {
    self.workspace_root = detect_workspace_root()?;
    Ok(())
  }
}

Sessions must be cloneable and be Send + Sync compatible. We clone the session when spawning tokio tasks. If you want to persist data across threads, wrap session properties in Arc, RwLock, and other mechanisms.

Phases

An application is divided into phases, where each phase will be processed and completed before moving onto the next phase. The following phases are available:

• Startup - Register, setup, or load initial session state.
  • Example: load configuration, detect workspace root, load plugins
• Analyze - Analyze the current environment, update state, and prepare for execution.
  • Example: generate project graph, load cache, signin to service
• Execute - Execute primary business logic (App#run).
  • Example: process dependency graph, run generator, check for new version
• Shutdown - Cleanup and shutdown on success of the entire lifecycle, or on failure of a specific phase.
  • Example: cleanup temporary files, shutdown server

If a session implements the AppSession#execute trait method, it will run in parallel with the App#run method.

How to

Error handling

Errors and diagnostics are provided by the miette crate. All layers of the application return the miette::Result type (via AppResult). This allows for errors to be easily converted to diagnostics, and for miette to automatically render to the terminal for errors and panics.

To benefit from this, update your main function to return MainResult.

use starbase::{App, MainResult};

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> MainResult {
  let app = App::default();
  app.setup_diagnostics();
  app.setup_tracing_defaults();

  // ...

  Ok(())
}

To make the most out of errors, and in turn diagnostics, it's best (also suggested) to use the thiserror crate.

use miette::Diagnostic;
use thiserror::Error;

#[derive(Debug, Diagnostic, Error)]
pub enum AppError {
    #[error(transparent)]
    #[diagnostic(code(app::io_error))]
    IoError(#[from] std::io::Error),

    #[error("Systems offline!")]
    #[diagnostic(code(app::bad_code))]
    SystemsOffline,
}

Caveats

A returned Err must be converted to a diagnostic first. There are 2 approaches to achieve this:

#[system]
async fn could_fail() {
  // Convert error using into()
  Err(AppError::SystemsOffline.into())

  // OR use ? operator on Err()
  Err(AppError::SystemsOffline)?
}