Task-Automator - Declarative CLI Automation Framework

Supported Platforms

Overview | What is Task-Automator? | Features | Installation | Build | Defining Commands | License

[!IMPORTANT] 📣 As of March 2025 Task-Automator is still in early development. 📣

Task-Automator is a best-effort open project library. This means that support is not guaranteed and how long the project will be maintained is unknown.

What is Task-Automator?

Task-Automator is a modern Python framework for building declarative command-line interfaces
with nested subcommands, designed for automation workflows and build systems.

Task-Automator is implemented in pure Python that enables scripting of more complicated tasks.

Features

• 🚀 Declarative Command Tree - Define CLI structure through simple nested dictionaries
• 🛠 Zero Boilerplate - Focus on business logic, not argument parsing
• 📚 Automatic Help Generation - Built-in help system with hierarchical documentation
• 🌳 Hierarchical Commands - Support for unlimited nested subcommands
• 🖥 Cross-Platform - Works on Windows, Linux, and macOS
• 📚 Filesystem & Web utils: Utility functions for filesystem operations and web

Installation

You can use pip to install Task-Automator

pip install task-automator

Build

Task-Automator uses Poetry for its build process. To build the wheel file and source distribution run:

poetry build

Defining Commands

Create your automation structure in a Python module (like my_automator.py):

...
import build_macos_wheel
import build_macos_exe
import build_macos_so
import run_pytest
import dev_env


AUTOMATION_TREE = {
  "setup": {
    "help": "Setup automations",
    "subcommands": {
      "dev-env": {
        "help": "Sets up the development environment",
        "func": dev_env.setup_dev_env
      }
    }
  },
  "build": {
    "help": "Build targets",
    "subcommands": {
      "wheel": {
        "help": "Builds the Python wheel file",
        "func": build_macos_wheel.build_wheel
      },
      "exe": {
        "help": "Creates a frozen Python application",
        "func": build_macos_exe.build
      },
      "so": {
        "help": "Compiles the _cmd module from source",
        "func": build_macos_so.build_cmd_module
      }
    }
  },
  "test": {
    "help": "Runs all tests under the tests/ directory using pytest.",
    "func": run_pytest.run_pytest_suite
  }
}


if __name__ == "__main__":
  from task_automator import automator
  automator.Automator(AUTOMATION_TREE).run()

Important Note

If you connect your automation functions in the tree using the func key, you must NOT add parenthesis after the function name! Otherwise, it will sequentially execute your tree and ignore all passed arguments.

License

This project is licensed under the BSD-3 License - see the LICENSE file for details.