Doc generation default value set by environment variable

[sj14]

My urfave/cli version is v2.27.2

Checklist

• Are you running the latest v2 release? The list of releases is here.
• Did you check the manual for your release? The v2 manual is here
• Did you perform a search about this problem? Here's the GitHub guide about searching.
  • Seems like a related issue: Flag default value is overwritten by environment in help output. #1206

Dependency Management

• My project is using go modules.

Describe the bug

When you have a flag which can also be set by an env var, and the flag is empty, the value from the env will be used in the output docs markdown.

To reproduce

package main

import (
	"log"
	"os"

	"github.com/urfave/cli/v2"
)

func main() {
	app := &cli.App{
		Flags: []cli.Flag{
			&cli.StringFlag{
				Name:    "url",
				Value:   "http://127.0.0.1",
				EnvVars: []string{"URL"},
			},
			&cli.StringFlag{
				Name:    "token",
				Value:   "",
				EnvVars: []string{"TOKEN"},
			},
		},
		Commands: []*cli.Command{
			{
				Name:   "docs",
				Hidden: true,
				Action: func(ctx *cli.Context) error {
					s, err := ctx.App.ToMan()
					if err != nil {
						return err
					}
					return os.WriteFile("DOCS.man", []byte(s), os.ModePerm)
				},
			},
		},
	}

	if err := app.Run(os.Args); err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}
}

Observed behavior

When running the example like this

TOKEN=my-token URL=my-url go run test/main.go docs

a file called DOCS.man is created with the follwing content:

.nh
.TH main 8

.SH NAME
.PP
main - A new cli application


.SH SYNOPSIS
.PP
main

.EX
[--help|-h]
[--token]=[value]
[--url]=[value]
.EE

.PP
\fBUsage\fP:

.EX
main [GLOBAL OPTIONS] command [COMMAND OPTIONS] [ARGUMENTS...]
.EE


.SH GLOBAL OPTIONS
.PP
\fB--help, -h\fP: show help

.PP
\fB--token\fP="":  (default: my-token)

.PP
\fB--url\fP="":  (default: "http://127.0.0.1")


.SH COMMANDS
.SH help, h
.PP
Shows a list of commands or help for one command

Expected behavior

The token flag should not show the environment variable as the default value.

Additional context

This happens for the Markdown generation too.

Run go version and paste its output here

go version go1.22.2 darwin/amd64

Run go env and paste its output here

GO111MODULE=''
GOARCH='amd64'
GOBIN=''
GOCACHE='/Users/simon/Library/Caches/go-build'
GOENV='/Users/simon/Library/Application Support/go/env'
GOEXE=''
GOEXPERIMENT=''
GOFLAGS=''
GOHOSTARCH='amd64'
GOHOSTOS='darwin'
GOINSECURE=''
GOMODCACHE='/Users/simon/go/pkg/mod'
GONOPROXY=''
GONOSUMDB=''
GOOS='darwin'
GOPATH='/Users/simon/go'
GOPRIVATE=''
GOPROXY='https://proxy.golang.org,direct'
GOROOT='/usr/local/Cellar/go/1.22.2/libexec'
GOSUMDB='sum.golang.org'
GOTMPDIR=''
GOTOOLCHAIN='auto'
GOTOOLDIR='/usr/local/Cellar/go/1.22.2/libexec/pkg/tool/darwin_amd64'
GOVCS=''
GOVERSION='go1.22.2'
GCCGO='gccgo'
GOAMD64='v1'
AR='ar'
CC='cc'
CXX='c++'
CGO_ENABLED='1'
GOMOD='/Users/simon/repos/personal/<REMOVED>/go.mod'
GOWORK=''
CGO_CFLAGS='-O2 -g'
CGO_CPPFLAGS=''
CGO_CXXFLAGS='-O2 -g'
CGO_FFLAGS='-O2 -g'
CGO_LDFLAGS='-O2 -g'
PKG_CONFIG='pkg-config'
GOGCCFLAGS='-fPIC -arch x86_64 -m64 -pthread -fno-caret-diagnostics -Qunused-arguments -fmessage-length=0 -ffile-prefix-map=/var/folders/c2/c287hy7d1n17sjlxsn7ctph00000gn/T/go-build3874607874=/tmp/go-build -gno-record-gcc-switches -fno-common'

[meatballhat]

@sj14 Thank you for reporting this! Differentiating between "unset" and "uninitialized" values, and the precedence of value sources, have long been sources of surprising behavior. I believe that the intended behavior is that flag and env parsing should be completely separate from help text and documentation generation, so I think that treating this as a bug is very fair. I suspect that fixing this the right way will require non-trivial rework of the help text and documentation generation code, which tells me that this work should probably be targeting v3 on the main branch. Does that sound reasonable to you?

[sj14]

Sound reasonable to me, but maybe it can be documented in v2 as it can easily lead to exposed secrets.

[meatballhat]

@sj14 Thank you! Does any of the work required interest you? 😇

[sj14]

I may create a PR for the documentation but I can't promise 😆