Command Interpreter in Clojure?

[Nick Vargish]

My current project requires a command-line interpreter with limited functionality... For various non-technical reasons we can't expose bash to our users.

Our plans call for writing a console shell that will accept some limited command set, and Clojure would be the natural implementation language, since much of our functionality has been implemented in a Clojure library. We even have a command-line tool that exposes a lot of the functionality to shell scripts, but the parsing/function routing is quite primitive...

Any suggestions? Has anyone done work on a CLI implemented in Clojure?

Thanks,

Nick

[Alan Thompson]

Have you seen this:

https://github.com/clojure/tools.cli

https://github.com/clojure-cookbook/clojure-cookbook/blob/master/03_general-computing/3-07_parse-command-line-arguments.asciidoc

Alan

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[Jonah Benton]

Hey Nick, tools.cli is great for interpretation of command line arguments to a program; to actually provide a user with your own limited-functionality shell, take a look at wrapping JLine:

https://github.com/jline/jline2

along the lines of what Reply did:

https://github.com/trptcolin/reply/tree/master/src/clj/reply/reader

Good luck,

Jonah

[Jason Felice]

Here are some thoughts from having done similar things:

1. Don't invent a syntax, as we already have lisp.  If the parens intimidate people, just inserting the outermost set for each line will get you a long way.  e.g.

(clojure.edn/read-string (str "(" line ")"))

2. Make a multimethod to dispatch the first element of the list.  (Not eval, or apply, since security is a concern.)  If you want nested expressions, a simple evaluator does essentially this, except evaluates arguments first.

With a little finess, you could instead allow only public symbols from a specific namespace in the first position, and call those functions in a secure way.

3. JLine is the command-line editing library that's like readline for Java.