climate

This package contains some basic command line utilities for Python:

• one wrapper over plac for quick command-line argument processing
• another for logging that lets us avoid copying that same horrid logging.basicConfig(...) business in all of our scripts, and gives a sensible default logging style

Install either from this repository, or with pip:

pip install climate

Documentation for the package is at http://pythonhosted.org/climate.

Usage

At its most basic, just import the module into your script and use it to call your main function:

import climate
import logging

def main(foo=1, bar='hello'):
    logging.info('%s %s', foo, bar)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    climate.call(main)

plac wrapper

Automagically, the logging module will be configured for you! If you'd like to set the values for main from the command-line, just include an annotation (a straight wrapper over plac functionality):

import climate
import logging

@climate.annotate(
    foo=('value to use', 'option', None, int),
    bar=('greeting to offer', 'option'),
)
def main(foo=1, bar='hello'):
    logging.info('%s %s', foo, bar)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    climate.call(main)

argparse wrapper

Finally, if you prefer using slightly more heavy-weight command line arguments, climate provides some convenience wrappers for you:

import climate
import logging

g = climate.add_group('Foo')
g.add_argument('-a', '--alfred', type=int, default=2, help='ALFRED!')
g.add_argument('-b', '--betty', type=int, default=3, help='BETTY!')

def main(args):
    logging.info('%s %s', args.alfred, args.betty)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    climate.call(main)

Then, as with using the plac wrapper, calling your script with -h or --help will give you command-line usage help for free! The usage in this case will include a summary of the default value for each argument.

Unfortunately, at the moment if you mix the plac wrapper with the argparse one, then confusing things happen. Just use one or the other. My recommendation is to use the plac wrapper for one-off scripts, and the argparse wrapper for anything that's likely to be turned into a library.

Argument files

If you're using the argparse wrapper, climate allows you to load command-line arguments from a file, using the @filename command-line syntax:

python biochem-experiment.py --alfred 201 @experiment-01.args

Inside the argument file, lines starting with -- are automatically split into multiple options, and lines not starting with -- are treated as a single option. In addition, Python-style (aka shell-style) comments are ignored, so you can keep your command-line arguments annotated with comments as needed.

If you need to include a literal hash # character in your options for some reason, just escape the hash by prefixing it with a backslash:

--flavor raspberry
--color \#f39

License

The contents of log.py were mostly written by Bryan Silverthorn <bsilvert@cs.utexas.edu> as part of the utcondor package.

The other files are covered by the MIT license.