How to generate OptionParser require arguments

There's a similar question with an answer that may help you: "How do you specify a required switch (not argument) with Ruby OptionParser?"

In short: there doesn't seem to be a way to make an option required (they are called options after all).

There is an OptionParser::MissingArgument exception that you could raise rather than the ArgumentError you're currently throwing.

Faced with the same situation, I ended up with an option like this. If not all of my mandatory options are provided, output the user-friendly help text generated by OptionParser based on my defined options. Feels cleaner than throwing an exception and printing a stack trace to the user.

options = {}
option_parser = OptionParser.new do |opts|
  opts.banner = "Usage: #{$0} --data-dir DATA_DIR [options]"

  # A non-mandatory option
  opts.on('-p', '--port PORT', Integer, 'Override port number') do |v|
    options[:port] = v
  end

  # My mandatory option
  opts.on('-d', '--data-dir DATA_DIR', '[Mandatory] Specify the path to the data dir.') do |d|
    options[:data_dir] = d
  end
end

option_parser.parse!

if options[:data_dir].nil?
  puts option_parser.help
  exit 1
end