cli.rst

Command-Line Interface (CLI)

The mirror image of executing programs with ease is writing CLI applications with ease. Python scripts normally work with optparse and the more recent argparse, but they both offer a quite-limited and a very unintuitive/unpythonic way to work with command-line arguments.

plumbum.cli offers a different solution: instead of building parser objects and adding switches to them imperatively, you write a class, where methods or attributes correspond to switches, and the main method is the entry-point of the program. A simple program might look like so

from plumbum import cli

class MyApp(cli.Application):
    verbose = cli.Flag(["v, "verbose"], help = "If given, I will be very talkative")

    def main(self):
        print "This is my application"
        if self.verbose:
            print "Yadda " * 200

if __name__ == "__main__":
    MyApp.run()

And here's a more interesting example

Application

• PROGNAME, VERSION, DESCRIPTION, USAGE
• docstring
• run, main, help, version

Interdependencies

• Mandatory
• Requires
• Excludes

Switch Groups

Tail Arguments

Attributes

• SwitchAttr
• ToggleAttr
• Flag
• CountAttr

Argument Types

• Range
• Set