Question

When calling thor commands on the command line, the methods are namespaced by their module/class structure, e.g.

class App < Thor
  desc 'hello', 'prints hello'
  def hello
    puts 'hello'
  end
end

would be run with the command

thor app:hello

However, if you make that self executable by putting

App.start

at the bottom you can run the command like:

app hello

Is there any way to namespace those commands? So that you could call, for example

app say:hello
app say:goodbye

Answer 1

Another way of doing this is to use register:

class CLI < Thor
  register(SubTask, 'sub', 'sub <command>', 'Description.')
end

class SubTask < Thor
  desc "bar", "..."
  def bar()
    # ...
  end
end

CLI.start

Now – assuming your executable is called foo – you can call:

$ foo sub bar

In the current thor version (0.15.0.rc2) there is a bug though, which causes the help texts to skip the namespace of sub commands:

$ foo sub
Tasks:
   foo help [COMMAND]  # Describe subcommands or one specific subcommand
   foo bar             #

You can fix that by overriding self.banner and explicitly setting the namespace.

class SubTask < Thor
  namespace :sub

  def bar ...

  def self.banner(task, namespace = true, subcommand = false)
    "#{basename} #{task.formatted_usage(self, true, subcommand)}"
  end
end

The second parameter of formatted_usage is the only difference to the original implemtation of banner. You can also do this once and have other sub command thor classes inherit from SubTask. Now you get:

$ foo sub
Tasks:
   foo sub help [COMMAND]  # Describe subcommands or one specific subcommand
   foo sub bar             #

Hope that helps.