ExitCodes Annotation

@ExitCodes

The @ExitCodes annotation may be applied to classes and provides documentation on the exit codes that a command may produce and will be included in Help as an additional section.

To use it add it like so:

@ExitCodes(codes = 
           { 
               0,
               1
           }
           descriptions = 
           {
               "Success",
               "Error" 
           })
public class MyClass { }

The annotation takes two arrays, the codes array specifies the exit codes that the command may produce while descriptions provides corresponding description of the meaning of the exit codes.

@ExternalExitCodes

This feature requires a minimum version of 3.0.0

This feature requires the airline-help-external module

If your application has a lot of exit codes it may be simpler to define these in a separate file and just have Airline load this for you.

To use it add it like so:

@ExternalExitCodes(
  source = "/some/classpath/path/exit-codes.csv"
)
public class MyClass { }

This will look for the specified resource on either the classpath or the filesystem and attempt to load it as a CSV with no headers where the first column is the exit code and the second column its corresponding description e.g.

0,Success
1,Error

If you want the resource to be loaded from a different location you can customise the Resource Locators via the sourceLocators property e.g.

@ExternalExitCodes(
  source = "${MY_DOCS}/exit-codes.csv",
  sourceLocators = { EnvVarLocator.class }
)
public class MyClass { }

Here we use an environment variable as a pointer to our external help resource by configuring the EnvVarLocator as our source locator.

If you want to format your exit code data in an alternative format you can customise how Airline parses the data via the parser property which takes a TabularParser implementing class. The default behaviour is to parse as CSV which is provided by the DefaultExternalHelpParser, there is also a TabDelimitedHelpParser if you want to use tab delimited data instead e.g. because your descriptions contain commas.

Improving this Documentation

This documentation is itself open source and lives in GitHub under the docs/ directory.

I am not a professional technical writer and as the developer of this software I can often make assumptions of knowledge that you as a user reading this may not have. Improvements to the documentation are always welcome, if you have suggestions for the documentation please submit pull requests to the main branch.