Poe the Poet
A batteries included task runner that works well with poetry or uv.
Features
-
✅ Straight forward declaration of project tasks in your pyproject.toml (or poe_tasks.toml)
-
✅ Tasks are run in poetry or uv's virtualenv (or another env you specify)
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✅ Shell completion of task names and arguments
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✅ The poe CLI can be used standalone, or as a plugin for poetry
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✅ Tasks can be commands, shell scripts, python expressions, or references to python functions
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✅ Concise commands with extra arguments passed to the task
poe [options] task [task_args] -
✅ Easily declare named CLI arguments for your tasks
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✅ Tasks can specify and reference environment variables, even without a shell
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✅ Tasks are self documenting, with optional help messages and task grouping (just run
poewith no arguments) -
✅ Tasks can be composed to run in sequence, in parallel, or as a DAG.
-
✅ Works with
.envfiles -
✅ Can be used as a library to embed in other tools
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✅ Tasks can be defined in python packages for ease of reuse across projects
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✅ Also works fine as a general purpose task runner
-
✅ Ships with an official Agent Skill to help AI coding agents use poe effectively
Quick start
- Install the Poe the Poet globally via pipx or another method.
pipx install poethepoet
Or add it as a poetry project plugin:
[tool.poetry.requires-plugins]
poethepoet = ">=0.49"
- Define some tasks in your pyproject.toml
[tool.poe.tasks]
test = "pytest --cov=my_app" # a simple command task
serve.script = "my_app.service:run(debug=True)" # python script based task
tunnel.shell = "ssh -N -L 0.0.0.0:8080:$PROD:8080 $PROD &" # (posix) shell based task
# A more complete example with documentation and named arguments
[tool.poe.tasks.count-incomplete]
help = "Count incomplete tasks in DynamoDB"
cmd = """
aws dynamodb scan --table-name tasks
--select "COUNT"
--filter-expression "status >= :status"
--expression-attribute-values '{":status":{"S":"incomplete"}}'
--no-cli-pager
"""
args = [
# Allow $AWS_REGION to be overridden with a CLI option when calling the task
{name = "AWS_REGION", options = ["--region", "-r"], default = "${AWS_REGION}"}
]
- Run your tasks via the CLI
$ poe test -v tests/unit # extra CLI arguments are appended to the underlying command
Poe => pytest --cov=my_app
...
If you're using poetry or uv, then poe will automatically use CLI tools and libraries from your project's virtualenv without you having to run poetry run / uv run
Poe can also be used as a general purpose task runner.
Contributing
There's plenty to do, come say hi in the discussions or open an issue! 👋
Also check out the CONTRIBUTING guide 🤓
License
1 maintainer
Metadata
1 maintainer
Release files for poethepoet 0.49.0
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| File | Size | Uploaded | |
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| poethepoet-0.49.0-py3-none-any.whl | Python 3 | none | any | Details |
Total release size: 353.7 kB
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