cli2 cli

You probably won’t need this, unless you want to reverse engineer Python library from the command line in a beautful way.

Initially, cli2 was supposed to just bring Python callables on the CLI without even a single line of code:

cli2 path.to.your.callable arg1 kwarg1=value

This command was implemented again in this 10th rewrite of the CLI engine extracted from another repo, however this implementation features something pretty funny: cli2 is a Group subclass which overrides the default Group implementation based on the first argument passed on the command line.

Basically, when you call cli2 path.to.module, it will load a Group of name path.to.module which whill load one Command per callable in path.to.module.

When you call cli2 path.to.function it will execute the function.

As a result, these three commands are strictly equivalent:

cli2 cli2.examples.obj2 nested
cli2 cli2.examples.obj2.nested

That is because cli2 generates a group with every member of the previous group!

See for yourself with:

cli2 help cli2

Or just:

cli2 cli2

Because cli2.test_node is not a callable but a module, cli2’s cli2 CLI created a command Group on the fly with the module and added every callable member as command.

When you call a group on the command line, it displays help by default to drive the user.