Kubectl: Please add fish tab completion

Created on 19 Jan 2019 · 25Comments · Source: kubernetes/kubectl

Fish Completion - Feature Request

Please implement tab completion for the fish shell by building on work done in https://github.com/spf13/cobra/pull/754 or consider shipping automatically generated manpages beforehand.

Unfortunately an earlier feature request (#131) was closed even though the issue had not been addressed. Previous attempts to add completion failed due to the inability to generate them programmatically, but with the changes to cobra referenced above fixing this should be relatively straightforward.

Fish users will appreciate your efforts. Thanks!

Kubernetes version

$ kubectl version
Client Version: version.Info{Major:"1", Minor:"13", GitVersion:"v1.13.2", GitCommit:"cff46ab41ff0bb44d8584413b598ad8360ec1def", GitTreeState:"clean", BuildDate:"2019-01-10T23:35:51Z", GoVersion:"go1.11.4", Compiler:"gc", Platform:"linux/amd64"}

Related Issues

https://github.com/kubernetes/kubectl/issues/131 (closed for no apparent reason)
https://github.com/spf13/cobra/pull/754 (fish completion support in cobra)
https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/58484 (previous PR with static completion code)

arekubectl kinfeature prioritbacklog sicli

Source

babilen5

👍35 ❤5 👀1

Most helpful comment

That probably won't help too much since Kubernetes uses Cobra 0.0.5 and it might be a hard sell to to upgrade unless there are already plans to do so.

Helm just moved from Cobra 0.0.5 to 1.0: https://github.com/helm/helm/pull/7904

From my evaluation the changes are minor and backwards-compatible. But I can understand that upgrading may not happen overnight for kubectl.

It might serve as an example, but even if you look at kubectl's zsh completion works, if I recall it does not use Cobra's zsh completion, but instead translates bash completion using a series of seds to make it work for zsh.

Maybe using zsh as an example, something similar could be done for fish.

Zsh pretty much has the same scripting syntax as bash and has bash-completion compatibility support. Fish has nothing of the sort however with a scripting syntax incompatible with bash.

I think moving to Cobra 1.0 will be far less effort than developing anything specific to kubectl for fish completion.

marckhouzam on 13 Apr 2020

👍5

All 25 comments

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fejta-bot on 19 Apr 2019

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babilen5 on 3 May 2019

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fejta-bot on 1 Aug 2019

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babilen5 on 2 Aug 2019

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fejta-bot on 31 Oct 2019

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babilen5 on 31 Oct 2019

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fejta-bot on 29 Jan 2020

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babilen5 on 30 Jan 2020

Cobra 1.0 provides support for Fish completion: https://github.com/spf13/cobra/blob/v1.0.0/fish_completions.md

marckhouzam on 13 Apr 2020

🎉4

That probably won't help too much since Kubernetes uses Cobra 0.0.5 and it might be a hard sell to to upgrade unless there are already plans to do so.

It might serve as an example, but even if you look at kubectl's zsh completion works, if I recall it does not use Cobra's zsh completion, but instead translates bash completion using a series of seds to make it work for zsh.

Maybe using zsh as an example, something similar could be done for fish.

I don't know much about fish, but if someone wants to work on it, the code would go here:
https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/staging/src/k8s.io/kubectl/pkg/cmd/completion/completion.go

var (
    completionShells = map[string]func(out io.Writer, boilerPlate string, cmd *cobra.Command) error{
        "bash": runCompletionBash,
        "zsh":  runCompletionZsh,
                // TODO: add fish here
    }
)

brianpursley on 13 Apr 2020

/sig cli
/area kubectl
/kind feature

brianpursley on 13 Apr 2020

That probably won't help too much since Kubernetes uses Cobra 0.0.5 and it might be a hard sell to to upgrade unless there are already plans to do so.

Helm just moved from Cobra 0.0.5 to 1.0: https://github.com/helm/helm/pull/7904

From my evaluation the changes are minor and backwards-compatible. But I can understand that upgrading may not happen overnight for kubectl.

It might serve as an example, but even if you look at kubectl's zsh completion works, if I recall it does not use Cobra's zsh completion, but instead translates bash completion using a series of seds to make it work for zsh.

Maybe using zsh as an example, something similar could be done for fish.

Zsh pretty much has the same scripting syntax as bash and has bash-completion compatibility support. Fish has nothing of the sort however with a scripting syntax incompatible with bash.

I think moving to Cobra 1.0 will be far less effort than developing anything specific to kubectl for fish completion.

marckhouzam on 13 Apr 2020

👍5

Looks like kubernetes has cobra 1.0.0 now...
https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/commit/205ded20da8676ada99786a3ca54b28217041d09

brianpursley on 10 Jun 2020

👍2

I'll see if I can upgrade the completion to use all shells supported by cobra 1.0.0...
Fish, PowerShell, and change Zsh to use cobra's implementation

/assign

brianpursley on 10 Jun 2020

🚀3

I'll see if I can upgrade the completion to use all shells supported by cobra 1.0.0...
Fish, PowerShell,

Nice!
Be aware that Fish completion will not provide kubectl's custom completions. For that to work, kubectl must move from custom completions written in bash code to custom completions written in Go, as introduced in Cobra 1.0 (the new command.ValidArgsFunction field and the one for flags).

Also PowerShell completions do not support custom completions of any form at this time.

and change Zsh to use cobra's implementation

Don't do that yet. Cobra 1.0's support for zsh has less functionality than kubectl's current one. For example, again, no support for custom completion.

https://github.com/spf13/cobra/pull/1070 brings Zsh completion to the level of bash completions, but will only work with custom completions written in Go. So, until custom completions are modified in kubectl (and the mentioned PR is released), it is better to stay with the current solution for zsh completion.

marckhouzam on 11 Jun 2020

@marckhouzam thanks for the heads up. After my last comment I also saw that cobra has a new way to implement dynamic completion, and the old way only works for bash (and zsh in our case since it just modifies bash completion).

As part of this, I'll see what it would take to move to the new dynamic completion approach. At first glance it seems like it would be an improvement.

Regarding zsh completion, I totally agree now that I looked more into it.

I know how long it took to get zsh completion where it is today, so I definitely don't want to do anything to make it worse, so yeah, I'll probably keep zsh they way is and just focus on getting fish working for now.

brianpursley on 11 Jun 2020

@brianpursley if you manage to get rid of the old dynamic completion code to use the new way, not only will it remove bash code that's difficult to maintain and test, but you'll improve fish completion automatically, and eventually you'll be able to move to native zsh completion which provide completion descriptions, which are currently not supported in kubectl's zsh solution.

So I fully agree that such an effort would provide value. Thanks!

marckhouzam on 11 Jun 2020

👍3

/priority backlog

eddiezane on 22 Jul 2020

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fejta-bot on 20 Oct 2020

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brianpursley on 20 Oct 2020

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fejta-bot on 18 Jan 2021

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AlekSi on 18 Jan 2021

For full fish shell completion support, we need to move to go custom completions, which is done in https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/96087. Hopefully that PR can get merged eventually.

marckhouzam on 18 Jan 2021

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fejta-bot on 15 May 2021

Merging https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/96087 is slowly going forward...

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