tasker 0.2

Run functions as scripts

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

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

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:

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

The current version is Python 3 only. Use version 0.1.2 for Python 2.7.

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.