opsi-cli: Working faster with the Shell Completion

As announced in our previous blog post, we have released a new command line tool to work with OPSI environments. opsi-cli is implemented in Python and available as part of opsi-utils >= 4.2.0.187 as well as OPSI package in our public repositories.

opsi-cli offers a really cool autocompletion feature which I would like to introduce in this blog post. The goal is to make working with opsi-cli more smoothly—like in the shell, the autocompletion works for commands, subcommands, options, etc.

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How to set up Shell Completion for opsi-cli

Shell completion is currently available for three different shells: Bash, ZSH, and Fish. Support for Windows PowerShell is still work in progress.

To set up opsi-cli shell completion, type this command:

opsi-cli self setup-shell-completion

The autocompletion files are now being integrated into the shell’s configuration file in your home directory. As a result, the feature is available in the active shell session and after starting a new login session. For more sophisticated setups, please use the opsi-cli self setup-shell-completion --help command.

Features of opsi-cli Shell Completion

The opsi-cli autocompletion works just like traditional Unix shells’ tab completion. Type the first few characters of a command, subcommand, configuration item, option, file argument, or subcommand-specific argument. Pressing the [Tab] key completes the current item if it is unambiguous. Otherwise, you can type more characters and press [Tab] again to narrow down the list.

Pressing [Tab] [Tab] prints all available options or commands (depending on the context). This is how [Tab] [Tab] behaves in various situations:

• After opsi-cli or any command that has at least one subcommand: shows a list of available (sub-)commands
• After -: shows available options affecting the current command or the opsi-clitool itself
• After a subcommand: shows possible values for arguments, depending on the subcommand:
  • For the set, show and unset subcommands of opsi-cli config it shows a list of all available configs to affect.
  • For opsi-cli jsonrpc execute it shows a list of available methods (filtered by a provided prefix).

Give it a try yourself. Working with the opsi-cli autocompletion is so much faster. If you have any questions, feel free to discuss them in our forum.

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