tasker 0.1

Run functions as scripts

Tasker
======

Tasker is a way to organize your scripts. If you have dozens of small scripts and you keep
forgetting what they do and what parameters they take, **tasker** is for you.
Instead of scripts you write functions, put them in a file or a couple of them,
and then run the main tasker script giving them the task name and the parameters of the task like this:

run_task <task-name> [<task-parameter>]...

The **help** task will scan your tasks package and give you the signatures and docstrings of your tasks.

To be considered as a task, the function name should end with `_task`. The task name is the function name less the suffix.
Suppose we have the following file stucture:

run_task
tasks/
__init__.py
moretasks.py

`__init__.py`

```python
def one_task(p1):
print 'in one_task, parameters:', p1

def two_task(p1, p2):
print 'in two_task, parameters:', p1, p2
```

and `moretasks.py`

```python
def t1_task(p1):
print 'in t1_task, parameters:', p1

def t2_task(p1, p2=None):
print 'in t2_task, parameters:', p1, p2
```


Then we can run the following examples:

run_task one foo
run_task two foo baz
run_task two foo # fails, not enough parameters
run_task moretasks.t1 spam
run_task moretasks.t2 spam ham
run_task moretasks.t2 spam # works too because of default value of the second parameter

To generate the `run_task` script in the current directory run:

python -m tasker <fully-qualified-name-of-tasks-package> # default = "tasks"

IMPORTANT: All task parameters are strings.

You can include tasks with distribution of your project and run them all with a single installed script.
Suppose your project looks like this:

someproject/
__init__.py
somestuff.py
tasks/

Then you can include the following snippet in `__init__.py`:

```python
def run_task():
import tasker
tasker.main('tasks')
```

then include the following in your setuptools-based `setup.py`:

entry_points={
'console_scripts': [
'someproject_task = someproject:run_task',
],
}

This setup will create script `someproject_task`, which will know about your tasks.


Installation
------------

pip install tasker


Origin
------

This was inspired by the Ruby's `rake` utility. I used for some time the `shovel` python clone of `rake` until I got dissatisfied with it.
The important difference of `tasker` (apart from simplicity) is that it does not depend on current working directory.