Argtools

Description

A collection of decorators wrapping argparse module for building command-line tools with minimal effort.

Quick start

Installation

$ pip install argtools

Building a simple command-line tool

# examples/test.py
from argtools import command, argument

@command
@argument('foo', help='a positional arugment')
@argument('--bar', default=3, help='an optional argument')
def main(args):
    """ One line description here

    Write details here (printed with --help|-h)
    """
    print args.bar
    print args.foo
    return 1  # return code


if __name__ == '__main__':
    command.run()

$ python test.py
$ python test.py -v   # Increasing the verbosity of logging module

The argument decorator has the same api as argparse.ArgumentParser.add_argument. See http://docs.python.org/dev/library/argparse.html for details.

Building subcommands

# examples/subtest.py
from argtools import command, argument

@command.add_sub
def foo(args):
    """ This is foo
    """
    print 'foo'


@command.add_sub
def bar(args):
    """ This is bar
    """
    print 'bar'


@command.add_sub(name=baz)  # set different name
def bar(args):
    """ This is baz
    """
    print 'baz'

if __name__ == '__main__':
    command.run()

$ python test.py foo      # print foo
$ python test.py bar      # print bar
$ python test.py bar -h   # print help text of bar subcommand

Other features

• In command.run(), the logging module is setup. You can control the verbosity with options: -v, -vv, ..
• In command.run(), SIGPIPE occured inside of wrapped function will be ignored to ease piping.
• To use group or exclusive functionality of argparse, give argument objects (e.g. arg1, arg2, arg3) as @argument.group(arg1, arg2, arg3) or @argument.exclusive(arg1, arg2, arg3), respectively (documentation is #TODO).
• Builtin options: -v, --verbose and --debug can be turned off by setting command.add_verbose = False or command.add_debug = False