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Common headless flags (Buckminster)
Buckminster headless has a set of flags applicable to the basic entrypoint, rather than to an individual command. They essentially influence the context in which the commands run and/or provide a meta-way to customize the startup.
Below follows an introduction to what the various flags do.
Workspace management
As Buckminster at its heart uses the Eclipse framework, this exhibits itself in a couple of ways. One of these ways is that an ingrained concept is to work with a 'workspace', just like the Eclipse IDE does.
As it happens, the location of this workspace must be set very early in the lifecycle of an Eclipse application, and this is thus the interface to it. The flag is '-data' and should point to a directory (automatically created if not existing). By default, a workspace called 'workspace' will be used (created when first referenced) in the user's home directory.
Logging
Buckminster internally has a logging system. This is clearly visible when in the IDE (from the preferences pages). From the command line there are a number of flags to control logging behavior. A basic idea is that Buckminster goes to some lengths to trap writes to System.out/err as well as the Eclipse internal log, and to do so in a synchronous fashion with specific log writes. A full log from a run which mysteriously fails will help a great deal in isolating the problem in an 'after-the-fact' fashion.
| flag | explanation |
|---|---|
| -? --help |
Prints helpful information about the command. |
| -data <workspace> | Controls the workspace to be used by the command. |
| -consolelog | Redirects the OSGi logger to standard output. Very useful when you suspect configuration problems
and buckminster fails to start. |
| -L --loglevel |
Controls how verbose the logging should be. Can be set to one of DEBUG, INFO, WARNING, or ERROR. |
| --displaystacktrace | This option can be given if the user desires a full stack trace printout in case of actual code problems — normally it just prints a less daunting problem report if that happens. Regular 'errors' (e.g. bad usage of flags or similar should obviously be reported to the user in a more understandable manner). |
| -S --scriptfile <file> |
Informs Buckminster that commands should be read from a file. |