Console/GUI scripts with command-line arguments

[codeandfire]

I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this question, but what is the recommended approach to make console/GUI scripts accept command-line arguments? The current Setuptools docs on Entry Points don't mention this, but the Python packaging user guide says that the functions corresponding to console/GUI scripts will be invoked with no arguments. To test this, I tried configuring a console script for the following function:

def hello(foo):
    print('Hello,', foo)

and indeed on trying to invoke it like so:

$ hello 'bar'

the argument foo='bar' is not passed to the hello() function.

Then what is the correct way to pass command-line arguments? I checked the Pip source code to see how they do it and it seems that they manipulate sys.argv directly:

def main(args: Optional[List[str]] = None) -> int:
    if args is None:
        args = sys.argv[1:]
    ...

So is manipulating sys.argv the way to go about it?

[abravalheri]

Hi @codeandfire, your code should have access to sys.argv, that is the standard way of passing command line arguments.

The command practice however is to use a library to construct an interface for this.

If you want to stick with the standard library, you can try argparse.
There is a tutorial here and a minimal example here.

It is very common to see people also using click and typer instead of argparse.

[codeandfire]

@abravalheri thanks so much for your response, basically I was somehow under the impression that we are constrained to only use sys.argv in the console/GUI scripts setting, glad to know that we can use the regular command-line parsing utilities like argparse.

I am working on the Entry Points docs page next - do you mind if I include a line or two mentioning this point? That while the function being invoked through the console/GUI script cannot take any arguments, you can use regular command-line argument parsing utilities within the function to retrieve any input from the user. Because it might not be obvious to a newcomer - that how is user input supposed to be retrieved from within a console/GUI script.

[abravalheri]

That sounds perfect to me, thank you very much @codeandfire!