Python Fire: a library for automatically generating command line interfaces

Convenient. I especially like that it has a completion-helper.

The docs seem to go to great lengths to not state this clearly, but it works fine on bare functions too:

  example.py:
    import fire

    def test(a="yes"):
      print "a: " + a

    fire.Fire(test)

  cli:
    $ python example.py
    a: yes
    $ python example.py no
    a: no
    $ python example.py --a maybe
    a: maybe

I wonder whose problems this solves.

I have a handful of scripts with miniscule CLI handling (usually len(sys.argv) is enough) - so it's 3 loc instead of 5?

Then I have a moderate amount of scripts where using click or optparse makes sense. Just looked up one tool, there's exactly 12 lines (including import, ignoring linebreaks) to handle 6 different CLI args. I could use fire. Less code, more "magic", less self-documenting excplicit code

Then there's this application with 15 @click.option() lines (don't ask, ran out of sensible single-char argument shorthands). Yes, it has an ugly main() with 15 keyword arguments, but I'd also have that with fire I guess. but here at least it's explicit again.

TLDR: Sounds absolutely nice on first skim, but I don't see why I would ever use this. Have I been writing so many CLI apps in python already that I exhibit stockholm syndrome towards click AND optparse? :)

Some libraries just seem obvious in retrospect. This looks very cool. I've had a lot of success using click for command line programs in the past. Fire looks like it'd replace click for the majority of simple cli programs I write.

Looks pretty good. But if you're going to open source it, you might as well make it a proper Python project and conform to style guides (Google's own for one). This one has all the tests in the same directory as other files instead of a 'tests' directory, it's missing requirements.txt and method names start with upper case.

Looks great! Very intuitive. This is something I could actually see myself using instead of argparse; and being able to generate a CLI from a third party object is amazing!

Looks fantastic. Argparse isn't hard to use, but it's a lot of boilerplate. I'll be happy not to have to deal with it again.