Tau is a tool that allows you to create powerful interactive applications from your libraries without any boilerplate or repeated code.
With tau a library of methods can quickly be turned into a Click CLI, a Flask web server, or any other application you can think of (and implement a tau provider for).
cd tau
mkvirtualenv tau
pip install -e .Say you have a simple Python library.
# file readme/main.py
def echo(msg):
print(msg)
def add(x, y):
return x + y
def cat(file, loudly=False):
with open(file, 'r') as f:
if loudly:
return f.read().upper
else:
return f.read()Nice work! Now you want to turn these functions into a CLI, or a REST API server, while still allowing other developers to use them in their own code.
Everyone knows how to use libraries like Click and Flask to create powerful applications. However, you'd like to create multiple interfaces, with consistent input validation and minimal boilerplate code.
You'd also like to be able to set your parameter values as config files, environment variables, CLI flags, query parameters, or more. Surely there's some tool that can take some functions, their inputs, and their outputs, and create these interfaces for you automatically.
As a good programmer, you'd like to make it easy to test these functions, without excessive mocks or boilerplate code.
And finally, you'd like to keep adding new features and refactoring as easy as possible.
That's what tau is for.
With tau it's easy to create simple, clean interfaces to your library functions without tedious boilerplate code.
You simply declare your interfaces in-place and tau takes care of the rest.
Let's see tau in action.
Check out how to use tau with the above libray example in the examples folder.
If you're familiar with Click and pycontracts, some of this will seem familiar.
Now that we've read through the implementation, let's see what we can do:
$ pip install examples/readme/
$ readme --help
Usage: readme [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...
Example Readme Command-Line Interface.
Options:
--help Show this message and exit.
Commands:
echo Display a message on stdout.
math Utterly trivial math utilities.
cat Read a file, quietly?
$ readme cat /tmp/foo --loud
OH HAI DER
$ readme-serve
Usage: readme-serve [OPTIONS] command [ARGS]...
Example Readme REST Interface Server.
Options:
--help Show this message and exit.
Commands:
debug Run server in debug mode.
production Run server in production mode.
$ python -c 'from readme import math; print(math.add(1, 2))'
3
$τ is the name of my cat.
tau is easier to spell.
What else do you want?