Multi-level argparse in Python (parsing commands like git)
It’s a common pattern for command line tools to have multiple subcommands that run off of a single executable. For example, git fetch origin
and git commit --amend
both use the same executable /usr/bin/git
to run. Each subcommand has its own set of required and optional parameters.
This pattern is fairly easy to implement in your own Python command-line utilities using argparse. Here is a script that pretends to be git and provides the above two commands and arguments.
#!/usr/bin/env python
import argparse
import sys
class FakeGit(object):
def __init__(self):
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(
description='Pretends to be git',
usage='''git <command> [<args>]
The most commonly used git commands are:
commit Record changes to the repository
fetch Download objects and refs from another repository
''')
parser.add_argument('command', help='Subcommand to run')
# parse_args defaults to [1:] for args, but you need to
# exclude the rest of the args too, or validation will fail
args = parser.parse_args(sys.argv[1:2])
if not hasattr(self, args.command):
print 'Unrecognized command'
parser.print_help()
exit(1)
# use dispatch pattern to invoke method with same name
getattr(self, args.command)()
def commit(self):
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(
description='Record changes to the repository')
# prefixing the argument with -- means it's optional
parser.add_argument('--amend', action='store_true')
# now that we're inside a subcommand, ignore the first
# TWO argvs, ie the command (git) and the subcommand (commit)
args = parser.parse_args(sys.argv[2:])
print 'Running git commit, amend=%s' % args.amend
def fetch(self):
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(
description='Download objects and refs from another repository')
# NOT prefixing the argument with -- means it's not optional
parser.add_argument('repository')
args = parser.parse_args(sys.argv[2:])
print 'Running git fetch, repository=%s' % args.repository
if __name__ == '__main__':
FakeGit()
The argparse library gives you all kinds of great stuff. You can run ./git.py --help
and get the following:
usage: git <command> [<args>]
The most commonly used git commands are:
commit Record changes to the repository
fetch Download objects and refs from another repository
Pretends to be git
positional arguments:
command Subcommand to run
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
You can get help on a particular subcommand with ./git.py commit --help
.
usage: git.py [-h] [--amend]
Record changes to the repository
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
--amend
Want bash completion on your awesome new command line utlity? Try argcomplete, a drop in bash completion for Python + argparse.