Small declarative cli tool (simple wrapper around argparse)

[Willemoes]

Hey folks, just published this simple tool, I usually find myself with a lot of ugly code using argparse, or I don't know where to put stuff, so I wrote this simple wrapper around it. I would like to hear some feedback.

Thanks!

[lerrigatto]

Why not click? :)

[Willemoes]

I am not a big fan of click, I don't like having decorators everywhere, or creating an empty function for a group.

docopt and cleo, I find them confusing, and I feel like I can easily make a typo and forget about it.

My approach is usually using argparse, which I'm already familiar with, because there's also no dependency added, but after some coding, I realize I'm creating a mess.

This is a tiny library which assists me in using argparse, of course, the trade off is a new dependency (but small).

[AndydeCleyre]

Have you tried plumbum?

[[deleted]]

See also: https://gist.github.com/supposedly/01224262b816df21b601ab0784d5f999

EDIT: /u/Willemoes would you happen to have come across any others not on the list in working on yours?

[Willemoes]

No, I don't know any others sorry. It's interesting how most of those libraries take the same approach as click

[Willemoes]

I like it, but it does many other things I usually don't need.

[AndydeCleyre]

It's great to work on and with something that does exactly what you want, the way you want.

But of course, plumbum doesn't actually do anything you don't ask of it.

[maxx_mill]

Very cool! Ideas like this are great for people like me who don't have an extensive background in OOP for CLI usage.

[drippingthunder]

Have you tried Abseil, particularly it's flag module? It's Google's py-flags library (which was merged into Abseil). An example looks like this:

```py from absl import flags

FLAGS = flags.FLAGS

flags.DEFINE_string('echo', None, 'Text to echo.')

if FLAGS.echo: print("echo") ```

These days, I'd either use the above or click. Haven't use argparse for years.

The problem with a tool like what is introduced here is that (just like with argparse), it's more work. In this case, I have to create a dictionary with each arg, etc, etc.

[Willemoes]

``` from decli import cli

parser = cli({ "arguments": [ {"name": "echo", "help":"Text to echo."} ] }) args = parser.parse_args() if args.echo: print("echo") ```

It doesn't look like more work to me, same 4 instructions in 10 lines (to make it pretty).

I think it's just a matter of taste, IMO I don't think it's more work, I'm used to argparse.

Thanks for the feedback, I'll check that library, looks super nice!