Python Command Line Tools

Chapter 2: Test with Click

Noah Gift

Test a small click app

Writing command-line tools is one of my favorite ways to write code. A command-line tool is one of the simplest ways to take programming logic and create a flexible tool. Let’s walk through a simple click tool.

The following is an intentionally simple command-line tool that takes a flag --path (path to a file) and flag --ftype (file type). If this runs without specifying, it will prompt a user for both of these flags.

Simple click based cli that searches for files: gcli.py

#!/usr/bin/env python
import click
import glob

# this is bad code intentionally
# varbad=


@click.command()
@click.option(
    "--path",
    prompt="Path to search for files",
    help="This is the path to search for files: ...