Question

I’m trying to create a CLI with the argparse module but I’d like to have different commands with different argument requirements, I tried this:

import argparse
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument('foo', help='foo help')
parser.add_argument('test', nargs=1, help='test help')
args = parser.parse_args()

what I’d like is to be able to run python test.py foo and python test.py test somearg
but when I run python test.py foo I get error: too few arguments. Is there a way that the commands could behave like git status, git commit or pip install? or is there a better way to create a CLI in python?

Answer 1

This is what you probably want:

http://docs.python.org/library/argparse.html#sub-commands

With this you can add sub arguments which have their own argument schemes.