Best Practices for Writing Command Line Tools in Python

Abstract

We all use command-line tools every day to make our work more efficient. Tooling helps us improve automation, reproducibility, and consistency in our products. My talk will discuss best practices when writing a consistent tool suite in Python that can scale to a large community of developers.

Talk Description

Best Practices for Writing Command Line Tools in Python

We all use command-line tools every day to make our work more efficient. Tooling helps us improve automation, reproducibility, and consistency in our products. This talk showcases some best practices for writing command-line tools in Python. Topics include:

• What makes a good tool
• Python packages for parsing command-line flags
• Consistent command-line flags and exit codes
• Generating man pages and bash-completion for your users
• Automated testing of tools
• Using STDOUT and STDERR

About the Talk

• Type: talk
• Expected length: 40min
• Intended audience: Intermediate