pyTooling.CLIAbstraction

pyTooling.CLIAbstraction is an abstraction layer and wrapper for command line programs, so they can be used easily in Python. All parameters like --value=42 are described as parameters of the executable.

Main Goals

• Offer access to CLI programs as Python classes.
• Abstract CLI arguments (a.k.a. parameter, option, flag, ...) as members on such a Python class.
• Derive program variants from existing programs.
• Assemble parameters in list format for handover to subprocess.Popen with proper escaping and quoting.
• Launch a program with subprocess.Popen and hide the complexity of Popen.
• Get a generator object for line-by-line output reading to enable postprocessing of outputs.

Use Cases

• Wrap command line interfaces of EDA tools (Electronic Design Automation) in Python classes.

Example

The following example implements a portion of the git program and its commit sub-command.

Git program defining commit argument:

from pyTooling.CLIAbstraction import CLIArgument, Executable
from pyTooling.CLIAbstraction.Command import CommandArgument
from pyTooling.CLIAbstraction.Flag import LongFlag
from pyTooling.CLIAbstraction.ValuedTupleFlag import ShortTupleFlag

class Git(Executable):
	_executableNames = {
		"Windows": "git.exe",
		"Linux": "git",
		"Darwin": "git"
	}
	
	@CLIArgument()
	class FlagVerbose(LongFlag, name="verbose"):
		"""Print verbose messages."""
	
	@CLIArgument()
	class CommandCommit(CommandArgument, name="commit"):
		"""Command to commit staged files."""
	
	@CLIArgument()
	class ValueCommitMessage(ShortTupleFlag, name="m"):
		"""Specify the commit message."""
	
	def GetCommitTool(self):
		"""Derive a new program from a configured program."""
		tool = self.__class__(executablePath=self._executablePath)
		tool[tool.CommandCommit] = True
		self._CopyParameters(tool)
		
		return tool

Usage:

# Create a program instance and set common parameters.
git = Git()
git[git.FlagVerbose] = True

# Derive a variant of that pre-configured program.
commit = git.getCommitTool()
commit[commit.ValueCommitMessage] = "Bumped dependencies."

# Launch the program and parse outputs line-by-line.
commit.StartProcess()
for line in commit.GetLineReader():
	print(line)

Consumers

This layer is used by:

• ✅ pyEDAA.CLITool

Contributors

• Patrick Lehmann (Maintainer)
• Unai Martinez-Corral
• and more...

License

This Python package (source code) licensed under Apache License 2.0.
The accompanying documentation is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY 4.0).

SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0