Question

I’m writing a Django App, where I am expecting to use many management.py commands. I like the idea of python functions having parameters with default values, where you define the param as:

def function(param1=value1)

So I’m writing my management commands such that you input as follows:

python manage.py createdb user=some_user db_name=some_name

So far as I can tell, management.py commands don’t accept this type of argument list, so I’ve created a helper to do the following:

def process_args(args=None):
    kwargs = {}
    if not args:
        return kwargs
    for i in args:
        try:
            k,v = i.split('=')
            kwargs[k] = v
        except ValueError, ve:
            raise CommandError("Please Enter All Arguments as key=value.  e.g. user=admin")
    return kwargs

Is there a better way to do this?

Answer 1

Instead of rolling your own, you could use typical parameter style, and use something like argparse to parse it:

python manage.py createdb --user=some_user --db_name=some_name

You’d just define your argument parser and then pass the args argument to its parse_args() method.