CLI distribution artifacts

Cabin ships two CLI subcommands that emit artifacts package managers usually want:

• cabin compgen - shell completion scripts (bash, zsh, fish, powershell, elvish);
• cabin mangen - man pages (cabin(1) plus one cabin-<sub>(1) per top-level subcommand).

Both commands derive every byte of output from the canonical clap::Command tree returned by Cli::command(). There are no hand-written completion scripts and no hand-written man pages.

compgen and mangen are aimed at downstream packagers, so they are hidden from cabin --help to keep the day-to-day listing short. They are still listed by cabin --list, still parse normally, still appear in generated shell completions, and still ship per-command man pages - only the curated help view omits them.

The two commands bound themselves to completion and man-page generation: they do not write a Homebrew formula, publish to a registry, attach release binaries, or perform deployment integration. Release binary packaging is handled separately by the repository’s tag-triggered workflow.

Shell completions

cabin compgen <shell> [--output-dir <dir>]
cabin compgen --all --output-dir <dir>

Shell	Identifier	Default filename in --output-dir
Bash	bash	cabin.bash
Zsh	zsh	_cabin
Fish	fish	cabin.fish
PowerShell	powershell	cabin.ps1
Elvish	elvish	cabin.elv

Behavior:

• Without --output-dir, cabin compgen <shell> writes the script to stdout. This is the normal “install one shell” entry point (cabin compgen bash > cabin.bash).
• With --output-dir <dir>, the script is written into the directory using the table above. The directory is created if it does not already exist; existing files are overwritten.
• cabin compgen --all --output-dir <dir> writes one file per supported shell into the directory. --all requires --output-dir; multiple files cannot be written to stdout cleanly, so omitting it produces a clear error.
• An unknown shell name fails with clap’s standard validation error.

Examples:

# Bash
cabin compgen bash > cabin.bash

# Zsh - drop into a directory on $fpath, e.g. ~/.zfunc/
cabin compgen zsh > _cabin

# Fish - into the user completions directory
cabin compgen fish > ~/.config/fish/completions/cabin.fish

# PowerShell
cabin compgen powershell > cabin.ps1

# Elvish
cabin compgen elvish > cabin.elv

# Every supported shell, into one folder
cabin compgen --all --output-dir completions

Man pages

cabin mangen [--output-dir <dir>]

Behavior:

• Without --output-dir, cabin mangen writes the root cabin(1) man page (ROFF) to stdout.
• With --output-dir <dir>, the directory is created if needed and populated with cabin.1 (the root page) plus cabin-<sub>.1 for every top-level subcommand. Hidden subcommands such as compgen and mangen still receive their own per-command pages; the root cabin.1 page mirrors cabin --help and therefore omits the hidden subcommands from its SUBCOMMANDS section.
• Aliases do not get separate pages.
• Existing files in the output directory are overwritten.

Examples:

# Root cabin(1) to stdout
cabin mangen > cabin.1

# Full set into ./man
cabin mangen --output-dir man

# Install root + per-subcommand pages into a system man path
cabin mangen --output-dir /usr/local/share/man/man1

Notes for package-manager integrators

• The generated artifacts are derived from the clap CLI definition, so they stay in sync with whatever subcommands and flags currently exist.
• Refresh both completions and man pages on every release that changes the CLI surface - adding or renaming a subcommand, flag, or value enum changes the output.
• Both commands are deterministic for the same cabin binary: running them twice in a row produces identical output.
• Bundling the generated completion and man-page artifacts into a Homebrew formula, deb / rpm package, or release tarball is a downstream concern. The repository’s tag-triggered release workflow packages the Cabin binary archives and checksums, but it does not run cabin compgen / cabin mangen or attach those generated files.