feature(cli): dioxus-cli as lib

[notdanilo]

Problem

While it is possible to wrap dx using std::process::Command, a more flexible and programmable approach would be to reuse dioxus-cli as a library. Publishing dioxus-cli as a library would greatly enhance its usability.

Solution

This PR exposes dioxus-cli as a library, making it possible to reuse dx instead of redirecting cli commands to it.

A good example is how bolt-cli uses anchor-cli as a library.
https://github.com/magicblock-labs/bolt/blob/main/crates/bolt-cli/src/lib.rs

[notdanilo]

Thanks for running the checks. I will fix them asap.

[jkelleyrtp]

Thanks! Also - do you mind adding a no_exhaustive on any structs in the public API of the cli?

I'm okay with opening up the CLI as a library but that means the CLI needs to follow semver. We should try to keep our public API minimal in that case. This means marking things as no_exhaustive where possible and not making too many things public.

[jkelleyrtp]

Going to close this since it's been open for a while...

Also, having a little while to think about it, I'm not 100% sure we want to open up the CLI as a semver API. I'd be happy to accept a PR that exposes more of our types for Process/Command consumption, but I generally don't think people would even want to develop against the CLI. It's very heavy to develop against and does many weird things like overriding loggers, ctrl-c, sigkill, etc.

If you want to use the CLI from a script then I'd recommend using the types crates we provide to parse the output with JSON mode enabled.

[notdanilo]

I had to put the web-component effort on hold. But I might come back to this as this is something that would make it easier for me to release a cli that depends on dioxus-cli

[jkelleyrtp]

For sure - we could expose our CLI's arguments as an independent library instead of the entire CLI. We do that with the return types in the dioxus-dx-wire-format crate. I could see a dx-driver crate that wraps the dioxus-dx-wire-format and some Process work to allow scripting of DX

[notdanilo]

But doesn't that mean that I need to ask for my cli user to download and install dioxus-cli?

[jkelleyrtp]

You could download it for them with cargo-binstall. The CLI sets up lots of hooks that is going to cause trouble for the host program - the logging system, setting sigkill hooks, setting a panic handler, etc

Tools like https://github.com/dustinblackman/cargo-run-bin can automate downloading the right dx version for you, allowing you to get a handle to the program and execute it.

[notdanilo]

@jkelleyrtp thanks a lot for the suggestions. I didn't know these crates :)