The rtb-cli family¶

Four crates that turn a main() into a command-line tool: a command tree that assembles itself, error rendering, signal handling, and a built-in command suite covering version reporting, diagnostics, configuration, credentials and telemetry consent. Three optional crates add documentation inside the binary, signature-verified self-update, and a Model Context Protocol server.

Part of the phpboyscout Rust toolkit; extracted from rust-tool-base. The four crates share one version line and release together.

use rtb_cli::prelude::*;

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> std::process::ExitCode {
    let app = Application::builder()
        .metadata(ToolMetadata::builder().name("mytool").summary("a tool").build())
        .version(rtb_app::version_info!())
        .build();

    match app {
        Ok(app) => app.run_and_exit().await,
        Err(report) => rtb_cli::report_to_exit_code(&report),
    }
}

That gets you version, doctor, init, config, credentials and telemetry without writing any of them.

Start here¶

The four crates¶

rtb-docs, rtb-update and rtb-mcp each register one command into the same link-time registry rtb-cli reads. Adding one to Cargo.toml and referencing it is all the wiring there is — with one catch.

API reference¶

Item-level signatures live on docs.rs, generated from source: rtb-cli · rtb-docs · rtb-update · rtb-mcp.

Crates: rtb-cli · rtb-docs · rtb-update · rtb-mcp.

Related toolkit modules¶

• rtb-app — App, Command, ToolMetadata, the registries.
• rtb-error — the diagnostic pipeline this family installs.
• rtb-config — building the typed configuration the config command inspects.
• rtb-credentials — the resolver behind the credentials command.
• rtb-assets — the overlay that carries embedded documentation.
• rtb-forge — the release providers self-update reads from.

Further reading¶

The blog carries a curated route through this subject: Rust, and what survived the port collects everything written about it, ordered so you can start at the beginning rather than newest-first.