Using a decorator to simplify subcommand creation with argparse

cli.py

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"""

from argparse import ArgumentParser

cli = ArgumentParser()
subparsers = cli.add_subparsers(dest="subcommand")


def argument(*name_or_flags, **kwargs):
    """Convenience function to properly format arguments to pass to the
    subcommand decorator.

    """
    return (list(name_or_flags), kwargs)


def subcommand(args=[], parent=subparsers):
    """Decorator to define a new subcommand in a sanity-preserving way.
    The function will be stored in the ``func`` variable when the parser
    parses arguments so that it can be called directly like so::

        args = cli.parse_args()
        args.func(args)

    Usage example::

        @subcommand([argument("-d", help="Enable debug mode", action="store_true")])
        def subcommand(args):
            print(args)

    Then on the command line::

        $ python cli.py subcommand -d

    """
    def decorator(func):
        parser = parent.add_parser(func.__name__, description=func.__doc__)
        for arg in args:
            parser.add_argument(*arg[0], **arg[1])
        parser.set_defaults(func=func)
    return decorator


@subcommand()
def nothing(args):
    print("Nothing special!")


@subcommand([argument("-d", help="Debug mode", action="store_true")])
def test(args):
    print(args)


@subcommand([argument("-f", "--filename", help="A thing with a filename")])
def filename(args):
    print(args.filename)


@subcommand([argument("name", help="Name")])
def name(args):
    print(args.name)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    args = cli.parse_args()
    if args.subcommand is None:
        cli.print_help()
    else:
        args.func(args)

[ *name_or_flags ] seems to be invalid syntax now. I replaced it with list(name_or_flags).

This is a nice way of dealing with argparse. Makes it more like click. I spent half a day futzing with docopt for a subcommand driven CLI before implementing it your way.

@alephnull: thanks! I've updated this so that it works with modern Python versions.

This is excellent! Thank you for your post on subparsers; keep finding there is so much more functionality in argparse than what can be gleaned from the docs. It'd be great to see this recipe like this in the docs.

Minor edit from my own usage: subcommand receives argument as-is, and a little simpler unpacking.

def argument(*names_or_flags, **kwargs):
    return names_or_flags, kwargs

def subcommand(*subparser_args, parent=subparsers):
    def decorator(func):
        parser = parent.add_parser(func.__name__, description=func.__doc__)
        for args, kwargs in subparser_args:
            parser.add_argument(*args, **kwargs)
        parser.set_defaults(func=func)
    return decorator

@subcommand(argument('-f', '--filename', help="A thing with a filename"))
def filename(args):
    print(args.filename)

Thank you for posting your argparse tutorial . It is helping me to write better command line interfaces with argparse.
One thing I haven't figured out yet with your technique is how to add multiple arguments to the sub-commands.

for instance let's say I want to have an add_contacts subcommand and I want to have arguments for name, address and phone. How would that look?

I am able to add a decorator for the name argument, but if try to add multiple decorators I get the error:

Traceback (most recent call last): File "cli.py", line 50, in <module> @subcommand([argument("-p", "--phone", action="store", type=str, help="Contact phone number", required=True)]) File "cli.py", line 30, in decorator parser = parent.add_parser(func.__name__, description=func.__doc__) AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute '__name__'

any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!

Thank you for posting your argparse tutorial . It is helping me to write better command line interfaces with argparse.
One thing I haven't figured out yet with your technique is how to add multiple arguments to the sub-commands.

for instance let's say I want to have an add_contacts subcommand and I want to have arguments for name, address and phone. How would that look?

I am able to add a decorator for the name argument, but if try to add multiple decorators I get the error:

Traceback (most recent call last): File "cli.py", line 50, in <module> @subcommand([argument("-p", "--phone", action="store", type=str, help="Contact phone number", required=True)]) File "cli.py", line 30, in decorator parser = parent.add_parser(func.__name__, description=func.__doc__) AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute '__name__'

any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!

nvm, I figured it out, I wasn't paying close enough attention. I wasn't passing in all of the arguments in one list. It's working for me now.
This technique is the pretty awesome!

It's a sensible approach.

What's not clear is how to deal with flags that pertain not to a single subcommand but to the entire app. In the example, you've attached the -d debug flag to the subcommand test; but what if one wanted to make the d flag applicable across all subcommands. For example:

cli.add_argument('-d', '--debug', action='store_true', help='Show debug information')

does not work (error: unrecognized arguments: -d)

As written there's currently no way to add an application-wide argument like that, but it shouldn't be too hard to modify things to allow for that. I would think in that case it would be best to define an Application class (or whatever name makes sense) which can be given app-wide options. Then the decorators would be applied with @app.subcommand.

@mivade
could you post the class with the decorators? i'm still learning python and this would be a great example to understand. thank you!

could the sudcommand() be expanded to support aliases?

For global arguments, as requested by @NSBum and @mivade , there are 2 approaches:

• If they're truly global, just add them directly to the main parser (in this example, cli). Note that when using the CLI such args must be specified before the subcommand (./cli.py --global arg subcommand subcmdargs...)
• If they're a useful set of args shared among many subcommands, create each set as a distinct ArgumentParser() instance and pass them as parents when creating the submmand. There are examples in the official docs. Something like this:

niceargs = ArgumentParser(add_help=False)
niceargs.add_argument(...)
niceargs.add_argument(...)
...
someargs = ArgumentParser(add_help=False)
someargsadd.add_argument(...)
...

# Adjust the subcommand decorator to take in parents
# None: in real world you should NEVER use `[]` (or any mutable) as default argument!
def subcommand(args=[], parent=subparsers, parents=[]):
    ...
    def decorator(func):
        parser = parent.add_parser(func.__name__, description=func.__doc__, parents=parents)
        ...

# Now each subcommand can specify their additional args:
@subcommand([argument("name", help="Name")], parents=[niceargs])
def name(args):
    print(args.name)

@subcommand([argument("extra", help="Complete")], parents=[niceargs, someargs])
def full(args):
    print(args.name)

I recently developed a related python library for creating subcommands with decorator. Though it would be nice to share here: https://github.com/guludo/python-argparse-subdec

Here is yet another python library for creating subcommands with decorators:

https://github.com/innot/argparseDecorator

While I started with this little gist the project grew quite more than intentioned to make it as simple as possible to use.

With this library all arguments are taken from the function signature (no add-argument() calls/decorators required) with some optional data in the docstring. Example:

from argparsedecorator import *
cli = ArgParseDecorator()

@cli.command
def add(values: OneOrMore[float], squared: Option = False) -> None:
    """
    Add up a list of numbers.
    :param values: one or more numbers
    :param squared: when present square each number first
    :alias squared: -sq
    """
    if squared:
        values = [x*x for x in values]
    print sum(values)

parser.execute("add --squared 1 2 3 4")    # output 30
parser.execute("help add")    # outputs help info for the add command

I have just released the first version, feel free to check it out and give feedback.