Command Line Interfaces Prep

Overview

The first component of your team project is going to be just a command line interface to interact with your datasets. The goal will be that it can let the user get some basic/useful information from the dataset so that you are starting to think about what that information/functionality should be before you worry about making a website or a database.

There is actually a lot that goes into making a good command line interface (and you won’t need to make a super polished one), so today’s reading is to get you started thinking about all that could be involved.

Basic Learning Objectives

Before class, you should be able to:

• Get input from the command line in Python
• Identify some best practices for making a command line interface
• Explain the point of the help command

Advanced Learning Objectives

After class, you should be able to:

• Design a minimal command-line interface app that includes a usage statement and several features

Readings

To achieve the basic learning objectives, you should read the following:

• How to use sys.argv in Python - important if you didn’t use command line arguments previously
• Command Line Interface Guidelines (Abbreviated)
• Optional: Python’s argparse tutorial - maybe come back to once you start actually working on the code or skim now

Checks

Submit the following to Moodle:

• Come up with (at least) one meaningful way that a user could interact with your dataset and what the command line interface for that specific functionality could be. For example, if I had a dataset of all the dragon characters ever created and one of the columns was their name, I could have a command line interface to get a list of all of the dragon characters with the name Anya by typing:

    python3 dragon_characters.py --name "Anya"
  

  (Sadly, I don’t think there are any…)

• Write a few sentences reflecting on which aspects of the CLI Guidelines you have found most helpful when you have used CLI tools and why they were helpful.