Opster

Opster is a command line parser, intended to make writing command line applications easy and painless. It uses built-in Python types (lists, dictionaries, etc) to define options, which makes configuration clear and concise. Additionally, Opster supports parsing arguments for an application that uses subcommands (i.e. hg commit or svn update).

Features

  • parsing of arguments from sys.argv or custom strings
  • conversion from strings to the appropriate Python objects
  • help message generation
  • positional and named arguments (i.e. arguments and options)
  • subcommands (and subcommands of subcommands) support
  • short, clean and concise definitions
  • ability to shorten names of both subcommands and long options

Quick example

Here’s an example of a program that defines a single option:

import sys
from opster import command

@command()
def main(message,
         no_newline=('n', False, "don't print a newline")):
    '''Simple echo program'''
    sys.stdout.write(message)
    if not no_newline:
        sys.stdout.write('\n')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main.command()

Running the program above will print the help message::

> ./echo.py
echo.py: invalid arguments
echo.py [OPTIONS] MESSAGE

Simple echo program

options:

 -n --no-newline  don't print a newline
 -h --help        display help

As you can see, here we have defined an option to not print newlines: the keyword argument is used as the long name for the option and its default value is a 3-tuple, containing short name for an option (can be empty), default value (whose type determines what conversion is applied - see description) and a help string for the option.

Any underscores in the keyword argument name are converted into dashes in the long option name.

When a command is called using the long name for an option, the option need not be fully entered. In the case above this could look like ./echo.py --no-new. This is also true for subcommands: read about them and everything else you’d like to know further on in the documentation.

Nice points

  • Opster is a single file, which means that you can easily include it in your application
  • When you’ve decorated a function with command, you can continue to use it as an ordinary Python function.
  • It’s easy to switch between a simple command line application and one that uses subcommands.
  • There’s no need to type the complete name of an option or subcommand: just type as many letters as are needed to distinguish it from the others.

Read more in Overview.