🔮 Alchemist Shell

The missing interactive shell for SQLAlchemy.

Working with SQLAlchemy in a standard REPL is painful. You have to manually manage imports, handle async event loops, and deal with unreadable object representations. Alchemist Shell turns your terminal into a powerful, zero-setup database workbench.

🛠 Why this exists?

The current workflow for inspecting SQLAlchemy projects in the terminal is broken:

1. Manual Setup
   You shouldn't have to manually import every model and session helper just to check a record.

2. Manual Session Management
   In interactive environments, setting up and managing a session is repetitive boilerplate.
   Creating engines, instantiating sessions, and keeping them alive just to run a few queries breaks the flow.

3. Bad Visibility
   Default object reprs like <User 1> tell you nothing. You deserve to see your data clearly.

✨ DX Features

• Auto-Discovery
  Recursively scans your project and injects all models into the namespace instantly.

• Pre-loaded Toolkit
  select, func, text, and other SQLAlchemy essentials are available on startup.

• Auto-Formatting
  Model instances render as high-fidelity rich tables when evaluated.

• Modern Shell
  Powered by IPython with completion, syntax highlighting, and history-based autosuggestions.

📦 Installation

pip install alchemist-shell

🧪 The Workflow

1. Initialize the shell

Interact with your db having to manually load your session:

alchemist shell

2. Run queries directly on the terminal

All your SQLAlchemy models are autodiscovered and imported:

alchemist ❯ user = User(username="alchemist")
alchemist ❯ await db.add(user)
alchemist ❯ await db.commit()

2. Immediate Feedback

View your database objects as a formated table without creating a sophisticated __repr__ method:

alchemist ❯ user
# Renders a clean table with all column values

3. Native Async Queries

Full auto-await support when you need complex queries:

alchemist ❯ results = await db.execute(select(Order))
alchemist ❯ orders = results.scalars().all()

📜 License

MIT License. Permissive and simple.

Built to make SQLAlchemy development suck less.