How to write a better command line interface with python.
Writing the Nth python shell script I found myself looking again at the documentation of argparse, A NIGHTMARE. After 15 minutes spent trying to understand how to use it, I gave up.
It is at that moment that I found docopt.
Docopt gives you the possibility to describe the command line interface as a string, following the “man page” format:
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
"""
Usage: test.py [options] DIRECTORY
Options:
--debug debug option
--log-level=<level> define the log level
"""
And parse and use it with a single line:
from __future__ import print_function
from docopt import docopt
if __name__ == '__main__':
args = docopt(__doc__)
print(args)
Now you just need to call the script as ./test.py . --log-level=3 and it will print out a dictionary containing the options:
{
'--debug': False,
'--log-level': '3',
'DIRECTORY': '.'
}
In the official github repository https://github.com/docopt you can find the implementation of this library for the most common languages.
Or a list of more exhaustive examples.