How do I implement $ program help command

[MarcDiethelm]

I looked through the code and docs but don't understand how to get it to work.
There's a reference to this functionality at Command.prototype.addImplicitHelpCommand

But the method is marked as private, yet it's never called anywhere.

Either I just don't get it or this is a bug.

[tj]

our docs just suck, it's called for you when you do .command('subcommand', 'description here')

[MarcDiethelm]

I tried for a long time to grok what what you are saying, digging through the code (and the errors) and thinking "man, this makes no sense."

Until I found this: https://github.com/visionmedia/commander.js/blob/master/examples/pm
Which tells me what I want is not actually implemented, and what is implemented is not what I want. What I was looking for is getting specific help for regular commands (not separate executables).

Put differently I want the two calls below to result in the same output.

$ program help command
$ program --help command

Which I finally got working like so:

program
    .command('help [command]')
    .description('Show usage information')
    .action(function(cmd) {
        'string' === typeof cmd
            ? program.emit(cmd, null, ['--help'])
            : program.outputHelp()
        ;
    });

Yeah, docs could be better. 👊

[aurora]

Mmmm ... i really don't get it ... the "help" command does only seem to work when you make use of program.command('cmd', 'description'); but not for program.command('cmd').description('description'). I can't use the first variant, because the first variant requires the command to be a module file which i do not have and do not want in my case.

is there any reason this does not work for the second form other than that it's currently not implemented?

[shadowspawn]

The two forms supported by default in later versions of Commander are:

program help command
program command --help