blt: provides simple CLI superpowers

blt is a python package that aims to make it easier for application developers to wrap command line interfaces for the various tools they use day to day. blt was inspired by Heroku's toolbelt, fabric, and clint. We hope to stand on the shoulders of giants.

Overview

At blt's root is the concept of a tool, blt provides several tools out of the box. Currently we have support for:

• AWS (S3)
• Django
• Heroku
• South (django database migrations)

These tools encapsulate commands that you would want to interface with each system. For example, you might want to be able to push files to an S3 bucket with the AWS tool, or you might want to run a migration using the South tool. blt standardizes the interface for running the command and handles things like configuration injection so you can easily differentiate between dev/staging/prod settings when running a command.

Real-world Example

Let's take a quick look at a practical example of blt in action. Here is a sample command for running an AWS S3 sync on our staging environment:

blt e:staging aws.sync_s3 /path/to/my/dir

That's it! Running that command will pick up the staging environment configuration, connect to S3, determine the changed files between the S3 bucket and the files in /path/to/my/dir, and push them up to AWS. blt is able to automatically grab things like AWS authentication keys for staging and inject the settings into the runtime so blt can connect to the bucket. Pretty sweet!

blt Grammar

blt has an opinionated command grammar and enforces a strict way of running commands for tools. blt was designed to have a consistent run style so that no matter what tool you are running commands for, it will have the same basic format. Let's break down the aws run from above:

     blt          e:staging     aws       .       sync_s3    /path/to/my/dir
      ^               ^          ^        ^          ^              ^
      |               |          |        |          |              |
      |               |          |        |          |              |

blt executable   environment    tool   separator  command         args

Installation

blt is available on PyPi and installable through pip:

$ pip install blt

More to come!

More documentaion/examples to come down the road!