frontdoor 0.1.2

Aids the creation of "front door" scripts.

This simple module aids in the creation of “front door” scripts, which can help organize automated scripts and reduce the need for overly verbose docs. The idea is you can copy frontdoor.py into your repository to make it easy to bootstrap a front door script of your own (the other files in this repo are just examples that illustrate how frontdoor.py is used).

A front door script is a command which accepts a series of options which themselves may defer to other commands or processes which do work of some kind.

So say you have a project that has unit tests, integration tests, and deployment scripts. Typically you’d include a series of scripts, along with documentation on what scripts do what and how. What makes a front door script different is that you just document it’s available and users can find other options by jumping in and exploring it themselves. The end result feels a little like playing an interactive fiction computer game such as Zork.

This solves a different use case from argparse as argparse is more about creating robust, single purpose tools that can be invoked in flexible ways, where as Front Door is about creating scripts that more easily accept positional arguments and can defer to other commands. It’s also extremely simple and designed to be copy and pasted.