I'm using click (http://click.pocoo.org/3/) to create a command line application, but I don't know how to create a shell for this application.
Suppose I'm writing a program called test and I have commands called subtest1 and subtest2
I was able to make it work from terminal like:
$ test subtest1
$ test subtest2
But what I was thinking about is a shell, so I could do:
$ test
>> subtest1
>> subtest2
Is this possible with click?
This is not impossible with click, but there's no built-in support for that either. The first you would have to do is making your group callback invokable without a subcommand by passing invoke_without_command=True
into the group decorator (as described here). Then your group callback would have to implement a REPL. Python has the cmd framework for doing this in the standard library. Making the click subcommands available there involves overriding cmd.Cmd.default
, like in the code snippet below. Getting all the details right, like help
, should be doable in a few lines.
import click
import cmd
class REPL(cmd.Cmd):
def __init__(self, ctx):
cmd.Cmd.__init__(self)
self.ctx = ctx
def default(self, line):
subcommand = cli.commands.get(line)
if subcommand:
self.ctx.invoke(subcommand)
else:
return cmd.Cmd.default(self, line)
@click.group(invoke_without_command=True)
@click.pass_context
def cli(ctx):
if ctx.invoked_subcommand is None:
repl = REPL(ctx)
repl.cmdloop()
@cli.command()
def a():
"""The `a` command prints an 'a'."""
print "a"
@cli.command()
def b():
"""The `b` command prints a 'b'."""
print "b"
if __name__ == "__main__":
cli()
I was trying to do something similar to the OP, but with additional options / nested sub-sub-commands. The first answer using the builtin cmd module did not work in my case; maybe with some more fiddling.. But I did just run across click-shell. Haven't had a chance to test it extensively, but so far, it seems to work exactly as expected.
I know this is super old, but I've been working on fpbhb's solution to support options as well. I'm sure this could use some more work, but here is a basic example of how it could be done:
import click
import cmd
import sys
from click import BaseCommand, UsageError
class REPL(cmd.Cmd):
def __init__(self, ctx):
cmd.Cmd.__init__(self)
self.ctx = ctx
def default(self, line):
subcommand = line.split()[0]
args = line.split()[1:]
subcommand = cli.commands.get(subcommand)
if subcommand:
try:
subcommand.parse_args(self.ctx, args)
self.ctx.forward(subcommand)
except UsageError as e:
print(e.format_message())
else:
return cmd.Cmd.default(self, line)
@click.group(invoke_without_command=True)
@click.pass_context
def cli(ctx):
if ctx.invoked_subcommand is None:
repl = REPL(ctx)
repl.cmdloop()
@cli.command()
@click.option('--foo', required=True)
def a(foo):
print("a")
print(foo)
return 'banana'
@cli.command()
@click.option('--foo', required=True)
def b(foo):
print("b")
print(foo)
if __name__ == "__main__":
cli()
There is now a library called click_repl that does most of the work for you. Thought I'd share my efforts in getting this to work.
The one difficulty is that you have to make a specific command the repl
command, but we can repurpose @fpbhb's approach to allow calling that command by default if another one isn't provided.
This is a fully working example that supports all click options, with command history, as well as being able to call commands directly without entering the REPL:
import click
import click_repl
import os
from prompt_toolkit.history import FileHistory
@click.group(invoke_without_command=True)
@click.pass_context
def cli(ctx):
"""Pleasantries CLI"""
if ctx.invoked_subcommand is None:
ctx.invoke(repl)
@cli.command()
@click.option('--name', default='world')
def hello(name):
"""Say hello"""
click.echo('Hello, {}!'.format(name))
@cli.command()
@click.option('--name', default='moon')
def goodnight(name):
"""Say goodnight"""
click.echo('Goodnight, {}.'.format(name))
@cli.command()
def repl():
"""Start an interactive session"""
prompt_kwargs = {
'history': FileHistory(os.path.expanduser('~/.repl_history'))
}
click_repl.repl(click.get_current_context(), prompt_kwargs=prompt_kwargs)
if __name__ == '__main__':
cli(obj={})
Here's what it looks like to use the REPL:
$ python pleasantries.py
> hello
Hello, world!
> goodnight --name fpbhb
Goodnight, fpbhb.
And to use the command line subcommands directly:
$ python pleasntries.py goodnight
Goodnight, moon.