diesel-rs/diesel

Port diesel-cli argument parsing from clap builders to clap derives

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#4955 opened on Jan 28, 2026

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 (4 comments) (0 reactions) (1 assignee)Rust (12,054 stars) (1,003 forks)batch import
enhancementhelp wanted

Description

Diesel-cli is a relatively old application. It was written at a time when clap did not ship a derive. This now changed on the upstream side (since quite some time). Using the derive allows to more easily change/add arguments and documentation to the CLI tool, therefore we would like to move our old argument parsing code over to use the clap derive macro. Hopefully this also makes handling CLI arguments in our application easier as they are then type safe. This needs to keep the old command line interface

The relevant code is here

https://github.com/diesel-rs/diesel/blob/a7061cc602e9dd69f889236f3c66220239c9313e/diesel_cli/src/cli.rs

Relevant documentation:

Contributor guide

Tech stack
rust
Domain
cli
Issue type
refactor
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
3
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
1-2 days
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
blocked
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
clear
Prerequisites
familiarity with Rustunderstanding of clap
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
60
Research direction
The main file to modify is `diesel cli/src/cli.rs`. Study the existing clap builder code and the clap derive documentation to replicate the same CLI interface using derive macros. Ensure all existing arguments and subcommands are preserved. Check the issue comments for any additional guidance.