Pass scripts arguments

[jwickowski]

I need to pass scripts args into cake script.

it allow for the feature from issue 10

[jwickowski]

a question to readme file

[ecampidoglio]

Thank you for your contribution!

While I think that this is a good effort in solving the problem of passing custom arguments to the Cake script, I do have a few concerns about using a general-purpose library to parse the arguments defined in the workflow.

The Cake executable has a well-defined syntax to pass arguments to a script:

dotnet cake --foo=bar --baz

A library like yargs, on the other hand, is very flexible and will try to parse almost anything you throw at it into a list of options. Consider these examples:

const parse = require('yargs-parser');
parse('-foo=bar');
parse('-foo bar');

Both these strings will result in an object that looks like this:

{
  _: [],
  f: true,
  o: [ true, 'bar' ]
}

Which is not what we expected.

Is there a way to configure yargs so that it follows a well-defined syntax when parsing a string of arguments?

[jwickowski]

We can change the behavior of yargs-parser.

a canple you cen see here:
` var parse = require("yargs-parser");

console.log(parse('-foo=bar')); // { _: [], f: true, o: [ true, 'bar' ] }
console.log(parse('-foo bar')); // { _: [], f: true, o: [ true, 'bar' ] }

var conf = {configuration: {'short-option-groups': false}};
console.log(parse('-foo=bar', conf)); //{ _: [], foo: 'bar' }
console.log(parse('-foo bar', conf)); //{ _: [], foo: 'bar' }`

Will it be fine?
I can add test cases and implementation for that, but I am not sure if it is everything.

[jwickowski]

Hi.
The pull request is waiting.
Can you look again and tell me what should be changed to be accepted and merged?

[ecampidoglio]

I gave this some serious thought and I've arrived to the conclusion that this implementation is not the right way to go.

There are a couple of reasons for this:

1. Cake has a well-defined syntax for passing script arguments. It appears the yargs doesn't have a way to define one specific format to parse the arguments with, which makes translating the user-defined string into a set of valid Cake parameters extremely brittle.

2. Ideally, I would like the syntax for specifying script arguments to be a YAML sequence of key-value pairs:

   with:
     arguments:
       - name: value
       - foo: bar

Until it's possible to parse action inputs as lists, I'd like to offer a syntax that's as close as possible to that ideal.

Having said that, I didn't want to close this PR without providing an alternative solution. After a few attempts, I settled on doing what most actions that accept a list argument do: parse it as a multi-line string:

with:
  arguments: |
    name: value
    foo: bar

I've implemented this in 49c1c65 and it seems to work well. I haven't released a new version yet, but if you want to try out the new arguments parameter right away, you can do so by referencing the master branch in your workflow:

steps:
  - name: Run the Cake script
    uses: cake-build/cake-action@master
    with:
      arguments: |
        name: value
        foo: bar

Let me know how it works for you.

I'd like to thank you again for your contribution. Even if the code itself ultimately didn't make it into the project, it served me as inspiration for finally tackling this problem. 🙏