zbctl uses incorrect exit status 0 on error

[grexe]

Describe the bug
When invoking zbctl with invalid arguments, or Zeebe is not running at all, it still exits with code 0, which is wrong and makes it hard to integrate in scripts.

To Reproduce
Issue zbctl when Zeebe is not running, or specify a wrong address.

Expected behavior
Ideally, exit code 64 should be used to indicate wrong parameters used, see https://stackoverflow.com/a/1535733/160799

Environment:

• OS: MacOS X 10.15.3 (19D76)
• Zeebe Version: 0.22.1
• Configuration: n/a

[MiguelPires]

Hi @grexe. Thanks for reporting this.
When trying to reproduce this with 0.22.1, I was only able to get an erroneous 0 code when running zbctl by itself (with no subcommands). Other errors (either parsing or execution) always showed a 1 code. Can you confirm that any errors result in a 0 code? Maybe it's an OS thing, tomorrow I can ask someone to try to reproduce this on a Mac. The incorrect 0 code I'm getting when I run zbctl without any subcommand or flag is already fixed in the latest 0.23.0-alpha2 version, since we upgraded to cobra's 0.0.6 version (which contains this fix spf13/cobra#922).
Currently, I think Cobra doesn't distinguish between errors so there's no nice distinguish a parsing errors from an execution one. The one exception to this is the case where the parsing failure is due to a missing subcommand, that we can detect. I'll have a deeper look tomorrow to check if there's some way we can improve on this

[grexe]

Here's a concrete case where it should return an error status but exits with 0:

❯ zbctl --insecure status

Error: rpc error: code = Unavailable desc = connection error: desc = "transport: Error while dialing dial tcp 127.0.0.1:26500: connect: connection refused"
Usage:
…

❯ echo $?
0

[MiguelPires]

Hey @korthout, can you try to reproduce this on your machine when you have a spare moment?

[korthout]

@MiguelPires @grexe I've tried to reproduce this on macOS 10.15.3 with Zeebe v 0.22.1 (see: https://github.com/zeebe-io/zeebe/releases/tag/0.22.1), but I've not been able to get the erroneous 0 exit code.

  ↳ ~/Downloads/zeebe-broker-0.22.1/bin/zbctl.darwin --insecure status
Error: rpc error: code = Unavailable desc = connection error: desc = "transport: Error while dialing dial tcp 127.0.0.1:26500: connect: connection refused"
Usage:
...

  ↳ echo $?
1

[grexe]

oh no, as I feared and forgot to mention (sorry for that!), it's the npm wrapper I use that causes the error:

• with original bin/zbctl from distribution, I get the correct status 1
• with zbctl from npm, it's always status 0

Will open an issue there, please feel free to close this one.

[MiguelPires]

Ah no worries, I'll close this issue then. Thanks @nico and @grexe

[grexe]

opened bug in npm wrapper now: camunda-community-hub/zbctl-via-npm#1