Recline: A Documentation First CLI Library

We automate so that we can be lazy, but writing argparse-based command line applications can become tedious, repetitive, and tired. Let this library free you from that burden.

This library helps you quickly implement an interactive, command-based application in Python without all the work associated with implementing a frieldly and featureful CLI application.

import recline

@recline.command
def hello(name: str = None) -> None:
"""A basic hello world

Args:
    name: If a name is provided, the greeting will be more personal
"""
response = "I'm at your command"
if name:
    response += ", %s" % name
print(response)

recline.relax()

Running the above application would produce the following result:

$ python hello.py
> help
Available Commands:

hello - A basic hello world

Built-in Commands
-----------------
exit - Exit the application
help - Display a list of available commands and their short description
man - Display the full man page for a given command
> hello ?
A basic hello world

Optional arguments:
-name <name> If a name is provided, the greeting will be more personal
    Default: None
> hello
I'm at your command
> hello -name Dave
I'm at your command, Dave
> exit
$

Documentation First

We all know that writing documentation is very important and yet it can easily become and afterthought or a nice to have if we’re not diligent. This is often because it means duplicating a piece of your implementation in words, effectively writing the same thing twice. Recline strives to deduplicate this work by taking a documentation first attitude where your documentation becomes the implementation without additional work from you.

Interactive

The default mode is to run a REPL interface where a prompt is given to the user, the user types one of the available commands, the application processes it, displays the result, and then control is returned to the user once more.

But if your user isn’t expected to or doesn’t always want to run multiple commands, you also get a more traditional command-line interface for free.

Command-based

The application will be command based. Each command will have one or more words that identify the command. It may also have one or more arguments that augment or vary the action that command will take.

Batteries included

While the library is designed to be easy to implement for simple or small applications, it also comes with full power features for larger use cases including:

  • Tab completion

  • Input verification

  • Output formatting

  • Debugger integration

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