Autocomplete Phing targets on the command line

Shortly after writing my last post, it crossed my mind that it would be nice if I could autocomplete the targets in my Phing build file on the command line.

In order to do this, I read Buddy Lindsey’s Quick and Dirty Write Your Own Bash Autocomplete and made it do what I needed!

Start by creating a new bash completion file in the bash_completion.d directory. This file needs executable permission. This directory can usually be found at /etc/bash_completion.d, but on OS X using Homebrew, it’s at /usr/local/etc/bash_completion.d.

This is the file:

# Store this file in /etc/bash_completion.d/phing
 
_phing () {
    local cur prev
 
    COMPREPLY=()
    buildfile=build.xml
    _get_comp_words_by_ref cur prev
 
    [ ! -f $buildfile ] && return 0

    COMPREPLY=( $( compgen -W "$( phing -l | tr -s '\-' | sed s/^-/\|/ | tr -d '\|' \
        | sed s/\ \ .*\// \
        | sed s/Buildfile.*// | sed s/Default\ target:// | sed s/Subtargets:// \
        | sed s/Main\ targets:// \
        | tr -s ' ' \
        | sed 's/[^[:print:]]//g' | sed s/\\[.*// | tr '\n' ' ' | tr -s '\n' 2>/dev/null )" \
        -- "$cur" ) )
}
 
complete -F _phing phing

It’s a bit messy because my knowledge of sed/tr isn’t too hot. What we do is create a list of words for the -W option to compgen by running phing -l and then manipulating the output to remove everyting that isn’t a target name using various sed and tr commands.

Once done, compgen creates the wordlist used by complete when you press tab after the word phing on the command line.