4 Best Practices To Create Command-Line Interfaces in Python

Real-world examples that show how to implement command-line interfaces in Python

Using VSCode to create a command-line interface for your Python script, image by the author

If you are like me, you probably have many Python scripts lying around that automate the boring tasks. Most of my scripts use hard-coded paths and options. If I need them, I open them in my code editor and make the necessary changes.

However, there is a better way. By investing a bit more time to parameterize these scripts, you can reuse them without having to change them every time.

We are going to parameterize these scripts by adding a command-line interface.

We are going to discuss and build the following four options:

1. Parse and process command-line arguments manually
2. Use argparse, an internal Python library
3. Use Click, an external Python library
4. Use Typer, another external Python library

You can find the source files for these solutions in this Github repository.

The Script, Generating a Software License

Instead of using another hello world demo, we will make it more interesting. We are going to use a real-world example. We are…