icli - interactive command line interfaces

What is icli

icli is a Python library, built on top of argparse, which allows you to quickly build rich interactive command line interfaces with sections, command history, command batch processing, command repeating and interactive auto-complete.

icli uses readline library for command inputs.

Features

• Jump between command sections (use / for root section, .. or Ctrl-d to jump to upper section)

• Send multiple commands, separated with ;

• Repeat command execution, by adding |X to the end of input (X - delay in seconds between commands, use |cX to clear screen before next command execution)

• Auto-completion (via argcomplete)

How to install

pip3 install icli

How to use

• use icli.ArgumentParser just like argparse.ArgumentParser (create parsers, sub-parsers etc.)

• create dispatcher method for commands. This method receives parsed arguments in **kwargs:

def dispatcher(**kwargs):
    # ....

• define CLI sections tree and start interactive mode:

import icli
ap = icli.ArgumentParser()

# ...

ap.sections = {'user': ['account', 'apikey'], 'document': []}
ap.run = dispatcher
ap.interactive()

Customizing

Override:

• get_interactive_prompt customize input prompt
• print_repeat_title customize title for repeating commands
• handle_interactive_exception handle exceptions, raised during interactive loop

Global commands

You may define global commands, which work in all sections, e.g. let's make w system command executed, when user type w:

def w(*args):
    # the method receives command name and optional command arguments in *args
    import os
    os.system('w')

ap.interactive_global_commands['w'] = w

Note: global commands are not auto-completed

History file

If history file is defined, input commands are loaded before interactive session is started and saved at the end.

ap.interactive_history_file = '~/.test-icli'

By default, last 100 commands are saved. To change this behavior, modify:

ap.interactive_history_length = 500

Combining shell and interactive CLI

Let's launch interactive mode when your program is started without arguments, otherwise process them:

import sys

# prog param sets program name in help to empty for interactive mode
ap = icli.ArgumentParser(prog='' if len(sys.argv) < 2 else None)

# ...

if len(sys.argv) > 1:
    ap.launch()
else:
    ap.interactive()

Batch processing

Your program may read commands from stdin or external file, then process them without user input

To do this, put commands to I/O steam and launch batch method:

import io

f = io.StringIO()
f.write('user account list ; user apikey list\ndocument list')
f.seek(0)
ap.batch(f)

or just launch batch method with a source stream:

with open('commands.list') as cf:
    ap.batch(cf)