Generating Command-Line Interfaces (CLI) with Fire in Python
Introduction
A Command-line interface (CLI) is a way to interact with computers using textual commands.
A lot of tools that don’t require GUIs are written as CLI tools/utilities. Although Python has the built-in argparse module, other libraries with similar functionality do exist.
These libraries can help us in writing CLI scripts, providing services like parsing options and flags to much more advanced CLI functionality.
This article discusses the Python Fire library, written by Google Inc., a useful tool to create CLI with minimal code.
General Form of CLI Applications
Before we start with the Fire library let’s try to understand the basics of command-line interface programs in general. Depending on the program and command, the general pattern of a CLI can be summed up as follows:
prompt command parameter1 parameter2 ... parameterN
- prompt is a