Commandfile

Purpose and scope

Commandfile defines a file format to pass arguments and runtime metadata to executables. Its intended use case is to simplify and harmonize the calling convention of scientific modules in the LISA Scientific Ground Segment.

Usage

This project provides a drop-in replacement for the ArgumentParser provided by argparse.

# example.py
from commandfile.argparse import CommandfileArgumentParser as ArgumentParser

parser = ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument("--some-value", type=int, required=True)
args = parser.parse_args()
print(args.some_value)

When using this parser, your program can either be executed by passing arguments on the command-line, or by providing a single --commandfile argument compliant with the file format specification. When developing locally, both approaches can be combined, the command-line arguments overriding the arguments specified in the commandfile.

$ cat example-cmdfile.yaml
header:
  version: 1.21.4
parameters:
  - key: some-value
    value: '42'
inputs: []
outputs: []
$ example.py --commandfile example-cmdfile.yaml
42
$ example.py --commandfile example-cmdfile.yaml --some-value 24
24