Documentation: mention required=True for options

[gibiansky]

This is never mentioned as a possibility for click.option anywhere in the docs as far as I can tell (or at least it should be more prominent, maybe a section). (it talks about it in click.argument, but its unclear that it exists for both)

Someone just came to me saying, "we have to stop using click, i checked everywhere in their documentation, they don't support required options, which is important!"

Thanks :)

[rsiemens]

I think its intentional that it is not mentioned. Per the doc here

As its name indicates, an option is optional. While arguments can be optional within reason, they are much more restricted in how optional they can be.

While you can have required options, the nature of an option is that it is not required. Perhaps using the default=value would be better.

[pmdarrow]

@nudies by why provide the option if it's not intended to be used? IMO it should be removed from the public API or documented.

[gibiansky]

I don't know if this is an intended usecase, or maybe we are misusing click, but for us, all our command line parameters are options. Arguments do not provide the --name syntax, and for our CLIs we want every single thing to be prefixed with --what-it-is, in the style of keyword arguments in Python. As a result we use click.option almost exclusively, except for when we need nargs=-1; but that means that we need required=True sometimes for click.option.

Please don't remove remove this functionality; we would be very sad if our use case were deprecated for purely aesthetic reasons

[pmdarrow]

I should have mentioned I'm in favour of documenting & supporting it as well, not removing it (I realize it didn't sound like that from my comment).

[ariscn]

Big +1 for all the reasons stated. Options are self-documenting (--my-whatever foo), and are sometimes (often!) required.

[fleipold]

I have also switched to using named options as named arguments. This seems to be a widely used practice.

[rr326]

+1 as well. I KNEW there must be a "required" field - and this issue is where I found the documentation!

[marcinpraczko]

+1 to document this - still seems be not documented.
And in multiple arguments having required option is happening more quite often. For example writing something for search (as I am doing now).
So need following syntax:

app command --search 'string'
# --search is required at this moment

So I would ask for updating documentation as well.

[davidvhill]

+1 Named in lieu of positional parameters are pretty important for us to help prevent coding errors. In our case the named parameters are not optional.

The main reason I prefer a required option over an argument is not just that they are self-documenting via their name as @ariscn pointed out, but can be explicitly documented by using the help parameter in the @click.option() decorator, and listed with the inbuilt --help option. @click.argument doesn't take a help parameter so needs to be pretty obvious or otherwise documented in the function doc-string. It (argument usage) mimics bash and other shells, sure, and supporting that style makes total sense for continuity and consistency reasons, but for new cli users it's not great. I'd probably use argument if there were a help parameter for it, although that might not be consistent either. So yeah, add required=True to the docs, I also discovered it here on this issue thread first, thanks @gibiansky

[burakalver]

also useful for "if option a is provided than option b is required"; otherwise b is optional.