Auto-injected flags¶

Most teams run a small set of commands with the same flags every day. Instead of building shell aliases, elvanto-cli lets you put those default flags in the environment, scoped per subcommand.

How it works¶

For each subcommand path, elvanto looks up an environment variable named ELVANTO_<PATH_JOINED_BY_UNDERSCORE> (uppercased). The value is shell-tokenised (via shlex) and spliced into argv directly after the subcommand path.

(Anything two levels deep follows the same ELVANTO_GROUP_LEAF pattern.)

Opt-out rules¶

Injection is disabled in any of the following cases:

1. The user passed the global --no-env flag.
2. The user supplied any --prefixed flag after the subcommand path. The first manual flag fully overrides the env-injected defaults — they are not merged.
3. The variable is unset, empty, or fails to tokenise (unbalanced quotes, etc.).

This gives a "defaults you can step out of" model: the env vars apply when you're running the command bare, but adding any flag puts you back in fully-explicit territory.

You'll see a stderr note¶

When an env var is set, the CLI emits a stderr note after the command finishes so you can spot when defaults are in effect — or have just been silently suppressed:

$ elvanto songs list
... output ...
note: applied ELVANTO_SONGS_LIST defaults (use --no-env to disable):
      --category 45d9abe5 --used-within 6m --last-used

$ elvanto songs list --json
... output ...
note: ELVANTO_SONGS_LIST defaults suppressed by manual flag (use --no-env to silence this note):
      would have applied: --category 45d9abe5 --used-within 6m --last-used

Pass --no-env to silence the note entirely (and unconditionally disable injection):

$ elvanto --no-env songs list --json
... output ...

The note goes to stderr — it never pollutes stdout, so it's safe to pipe into jq, cut, etc.

Examples¶

Set a default category and recency window for songs:

ELVANTO_SONGS_LIST="--category 45d9abe5 --used-within 6m --last-used"

# Auto-injects flags above:
elvanto songs list

# Manual flag → injection skipped, runs as written:
elvanto songs list --json

# Bypass without changing the command:
elvanto --no-env songs list

Set a default filter for services people (worship team only, with email):

ELVANTO_SERVICES_PEOPLE="--hide-unfilled --in bf40484c --in 03fa8320 --email"

elvanto services people 02b06b47
# becomes:
# elvanto services people --hide-unfilled --in bf40484c \
#                          --in 03fa8320 --email 02b06b47

Positional arguments after the path (like the service id above) are preserved.

Limits¶

• Only two levels of subcommand path are inspected.
• Single-level commands (elvanto <name>) are supported but require <name> to be a real subcommand of elvanto.
• The env var is parsed as a single shell-quoted string — newlines or comments are not supported.