gcloud beta topic cli-trees - CLI trees supplementary help
(BETA) CLI trees are static nested dictionaries that describe all of the groups, commands, flags, positionals, help text, and completer module paths for a CLI. A CLI tree is often much faster to load and access than one generated at runtime from an active CLI. It is also a more compact representation. A properly formed CLI tree can be used to reproduce the help documentation for an entire CLI.
A CLI tree is a dictionary in a JSON file. By convention, the file base name is the corresponding CLI name. For example, the CLI tree file name for gcloud is gcloud.json.
CLI trees associated with Google Cloud CLI modules are installed in the data/cli subdirectory of the Google Cloud CLI installation root:
$(gcloud info --format="value(installation.sdk_root)")/data/cli
This includes tree data for gcloud (core component), bq, gsutil, and kubectl. Note that the tree data is installed with the component. If the component is not installed then neither is its CLI tree. An installed component does not require its CLI tree to run. Only the gcloud CLI tree is required by $ gcloud alpha interactive.
By default, CLI trees for other commands are JSON files generated on demand from their man(1) or man7.org man pages. They are cached in the cli subdirectory of the global config directory:
$(gcloud info --format="value(config.paths.global_config_dir)")/cli
The gcloud CLI tree is used for static TAB completion, the corpus for $ gcloud alpha help-search, and the data source for $ gcloud alpha interactive completions and help text generation.
$ gcloud alpha interactive uses CLI tree data files for typeahead, command line completion and active help. A few CLI trees are installed with their respective Google Cloud CLI components: gcloud (core component), bq, gsutil, and kubectl.
The generated trees are a close approximation. You can construct your own, especially for hierarchical CLIs like git(1) that are hard to extract from man pages.
TBD (gcloud interactive is still in ALPHA).
This command is currently in beta and might change without notice. These variants are also available:
$ gcloud topic cli-trees
$ gcloud alpha topic cli-trees