flytie 0.2.1

A CLI for managing, versioning, and exporting fly tying patterns.

flytie — Fly Tying Recipe Manager

A local-first, AI-augmented command-line tool for managing fly tying patterns. Tag and search your patterns, track every tweak with automatic versioning, generate trip-ready deduplicated shopping lists, export printable pattern cards, and ask Claude for recommendations grounded in your own library.

Everything lives in a single local SQLite file — no account, no server, and no network access unless you explicitly run flytie suggest.

What it does

• Manage patterns — add, list, view, search, tag, edit, delete, and undelete tying patterns with structured hook sizes, materials, target species, and notes.
• Version automatically — every edit creates an immutable version; list the history, diff any two versions, and restore an old one. Diffs sort materials alphabetically so reordering alone produces no noise.
• Library stats — flytie stats shows an overview, top-5 rankings, and timeline info for your library at a glance.
• Clean up materials — flytie material merge rewrites all references from one material name to another, eliminating duplicates across your entire version history. flytie material dedupe scans for likely duplicates using fuzzy matching and walks you through merging them.
• Plan trips — aggregate materials across any set of patterns into one deduplicated shopping list, excluding what you already own.
• Export cards — render a styled pattern card to PDF (or HTML).
• Get suggestions — flytie suggest asks the Anthropic Claude API for flies suited to a species, season, and water, grounded in your library.
• Stay portable — export and import your whole library as documented JSON.

Install

pip install flytie               # core CLI + styled HTML pattern cards
pip install "flytie[pdf]"        # + PDF export (needs the native libs below)
pip install "flytie[ai]"         # + AI suggestions
pip install "flytie[pdf,ai]"     # everything

The core install includes Jinja2, so flytie export <name> --html produces a styled, printable HTML pattern card on a bare pip install flytie — no extras, no native libraries. Any browser can open and print the resulting file. Choose the [pdf] extra only when you specifically want PDF output.

PDF export native dependencies

The [pdf] extra installs WeasyPrint, which depends on the native Pango / Cairo / GdkPixbuf libraries. These are not Python packages and must be installed at the OS level:

# macOS
brew install pango

# Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt install libpango-1.0-0 libpangoft2-1.0-0

# Fedora / RHEL
sudo dnf install pango

# Windows
# See https://doc.courtbouillon.org/weasyprint/stable/first_steps.html

If installing the native libraries isn't an option on your platform, stick with the core install and use flytie export <name> --html for printable output.

macOS note: install Pango via Homebrew (brew install pango) before running pip install "flytie[pdf]". On some macOS + Python combinations (notably Python installed via Anaconda when Homebrew's Pango is also present), importing WeasyPrint without a matching native Pango can SIGSEGV the interpreter rather than raise a clean ImportError. Running brew install pango first avoids the binary incompatibility.

60-second example

flytie init
flytie add "Parachute Adams" --hook 14 --tag dry \
  --material "grizzly hackle,hackle,1,feather"
flytie shop --tag dry                              # deduped shopping list
flytie export "Parachute Adams" --out ~/cards/     # printable PDF card

Documentation

Full guides live in docs/:

• Quickstart — install and your first pattern
• Command reference — every command and option
• Shopping list cookbook
• AI suggestions
• Migrating from a notebook
• Export JSON schema

Every command also has built-in help: flytie <command> --help.

Project status

Current release: 0.2.1. See CHANGELOG.md for the full release history.

Development

pip install -e ".[dev,pdf,ai]"
pre-commit install --hook-type pre-commit --hook-type pre-push
pytest
ruff check src tests
mypy src

See CONTRIBUTING.md for what runs at each hook stage, how to enable pre-commit.ci, and the formatter / coverage / smoke-test contracts.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.