Context only propagates to child commands the first time

[KernelDeimos]

I have an application that can be called in two ways:

1. manually invoke from the CLI
2. process directives in specially-formatted lines of a text file, which contain CLI arguments in the same format

For the second use case, I'm creating a Context that I'm passing to ExecuteContext for each of my directives. I noticed that the first time, sub-commands get my new context. However, for subsequent inputs the context is only updated on the root command.

Is this behaviour intentional? I can imagine this being overlooked as Cobra commands are typically executed only once for an instance of a program. I realize fixing this would cause a regression, so I'd like to propose something like this as an opt-in for the behaviour I was expecting:

func init() {
    cobra.OverwriteChildContexts = true
}

[umarcor]

Probably related to #908.

[github-actions]

This issue is being marked as stale due to a long period of inactivity

[marckhouzam]

Very similar to #1109

[tarvitz]

I've got the same trouble as well. I've bypassed it by traversing back to the root command and using its context instead of using the current cmd.Context()

Hacky, but it's working.

// ExtractContext traverse backwards to the root command and extracts the context
// of it.
// More info: https://github.com/spf13/cobra/issues/1469
func ExtractContext(cmd *cobra.Command) context.Context {
	if cmd == nil {
		return nil
	}

	var (
		ctx = cmd.Context()
		p   = cmd.Parent()
	)
	if cmd.Parent() == nil {
		return ctx
	}
	for {
		ctx = p.Context()
		p = p.Parent()
		if p == nil {
			break
		}
	}
	return ctx
}