config: Creating missing directories in CONFIG_FILE path

[dabrady]

Aloha 🌸

I'm enhancing my CLI to leverage a 'dot config directory', similar to many other CLIs. The standard config library will currently fail to create the CONFIG_FILE if any of part of the CONFIG_FILE path is missing, not just if the file is missing. Here is a minimal example:

example-cli
➜  bashly init
created src/bashly.yml
run bashly generate to create the bash script

example-cli
➜  bashly add config
created src/lib/config.sh

example-cli
➜  echo 'config_show' > src/download_command.sh

example-cli
➜  bashly generate
creating user files in src
created src/initialize.sh
skipped src/download_command.sh (exists)
created src/upload_command.sh
created ./cli
run ./cli --help to test your bash script

example-cli
➜  CONFIG_FILE='.example/config.ini' ./cli download foo
touch: .example/config.ini: No such file or directory

As a patch for my use-case, I have modified the config_init function in src/lib/config.sh such that it calls mkdir -p $(dirname $CONFIG_FILE) prior to attempting to touch the CONFIG_FILE:

diff --git a/src/lib/config.sh b/src/lib/config.sh
index bb3074d..eac2487 100644
--- a/src/lib/config.sh
+++ b/src/lib/config.sh
@@ -13,7 +13,7 @@
 ##
 config_init() {
   CONFIG_FILE=${CONFIG_FILE:=config.ini}
-  [[ -f "$CONFIG_FILE" ]] || touch "$CONFIG_FILE"
+  [[ -f "$CONFIG_FILE" ]] || ( mkdir -p "$(dirname $CONFIG_FILE)" && touch "$CONFIG_FILE" )
 }

Do you think this is a valuable enhancement to the core library, or are there good reasons to avoid that?

[DannyBen]

A few notes:

1. Most of the libraries added with bashly add ... are intended to be modified if needed. This is why they are added to user-controlled space instead of just being injected to the resulting script.
2. If you happen to edit a library file, be sure to delete the magic comment on top: [@bashly-upgrade <library_name>]. With this comment, when you run bashly generate --upgrade, this file will be forcibly overwritten by the factory default.
3. Another place that you can ensure the config path exists, without modifying the library, is the src/initialize.sh hook (bashly add hooks)
4. I intentionally avoided mkdir -p, to avoid surprises that will force the user to manually delete something that was accidentally created by the script.