Clidantic

Typed Command Line Interfaces powered by Click and Pydantic.

Clidantic tries to bridge the powerful typed data management provided by pydantic with the composability offered by click.

Quickstart

To install, simply run:

pip install clidantic

As you guessed, there are only two major dependencies, pydantic and click.

Once the package is installed, you can create a CLI using pydantic models or configurations.

from pydantic import BaseModel
from clidantic import Parser

# create your CLI params as a model
class Arguments(BaseModel):
    field_a: str
    field_b: int
    field_c: bool = False


# instantiate the CLI runner
cli = Parser()

# decorate functions with your models as input
# to use it as CLI command
@cli.command()
def main(args: Arguments):
    print(args)


# last, simply execute your CLI
if __name__ == "__main__":
    cli()

Features

Typed declarations

CLI arguments are declared using pydantic models in plain Python code, without the need for string-based argument declarations such as argparse, or even vanilla click.

IDE-friendly

Models are standard Python classes with annotated arguments. Auto-completion, linting and other IDE features should all work as expected, without the need to guess argument names.

Validation by default

Using pydantic definitions, clidantic inherently leverages on its powerful validation features.

Modularity

Clidantic offers full control over the CLI, with composable commands, and composable models: input configurations are as simple as plain models, this means that every validation capability, including custom validators, apply here.

Acknowledgements

Clidantic is by no means an original idea: the project is a condensed and pratical version of ideas originated from this original discussion. Special thanks to @frederikaalund and the cyto library for comments and example code.

Contributions

Clidantic is in early development stage, but if you feel this project deserves more love, you're welcome! Feel free to suggest new features and changes on GitHub.