vsego / argparse_gen

Argparse code generator.

Argparse Code Generator

A simple utility meant to generate the skeleton for the argparse interface of your CLI scripts.

Content

1. Intro
2. Installation
3. Usage
4. CLI arguments

Intro

This package provides a simple utility to generate basic argparse interface for CLI scripts. It works by analysing the callable that you wish your script to call based on CLI arguments.

More precisely, it gets:

1. the list of arguments from callable's signature;

2. help hints from the callable's docstring;

3. types, if possible, from callable's type annotation.

In some cases, it can do a bit more. For example, if the type of an argument is bool, the script will add action to its add_argument call, and if it is a Literal or an enum.Enum, it will create choices.

Installation

Just install it from PyPI:

$ pip install argparse_gen

This'll make argparse_gen script and package available to you.

Usage

If you run

$ argparse_gen -h

you'll get the full help for it, but essentially, it's used by calling

$ argparse_gen path/to/your/package/ name_of_callable_in_that_package

or

$ argparse_gen path/to/your/module.py name_of_callable_in_that_module

The output of the script is Python code that you can copy paste to your script's main file, and then adjust to your needs (the autogenerated version is unlikely to be perfect, except maybe for really trivial stuff).

If you wish to create your own custom scripts to prepare this code, use the package argparse_gen which exposes ArgparseGen class (which implements the whole thing), ParamDef (which implements one parameter), and main function (which wraps the class for convenient calls).

CLI arguments

The script recognizes the following CLI arguments:

• -p PARAM_REGEX, --param_regex PARAM_REGEX: A regular expression to recognise parameters in the callable's docstring. The default recognizes rST (reStructuredText) format.
• -i INDENT, --indent INDENT: Additional indentation for the generated code.
• -s, --skip_private: Skip private (those with names starting with an underscore) arguments.
• -c, --call_args: Instead of generating a call with all of the available arguments, use call_args (from the call-args package). This loses some transparency, but it's quite convenient if you frequently change the arguments.