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Junos-like shell library for Python

Project description

JSH is a Junos-inspired CLI library for your Python apps. If you’ve ever logged into a Junos device, you’ll know how good the CLI is. It offers:

  • tab-completion, including completion of names of items in the config

  • help by pressing “?” at any point

  • completion on pressing either space, tab or enter

JSH attempts to reproduce some of these features (and others) in a Python library based on Readline, to allow you to build better quality CLIs for your apps.

Documentation

Full documentation can be found at RTD.

Installation

Install from PyPI using pip install jsh.

Basic Usage

The library takes a CLI “layout”, which is a dictionary-based tree structure describing your CLI commands. For example, a completely useless CLI with just an exit command, you would define it like this:

import jsh

layout = {
    'exit': jsh.exit,
}

cli = jsh.JSH(layout)

while True:
    try:
        cli.read_and_execute()
    except jsh.JSHError as err:
        print err
    except EOFError:
        break

This creates a basic layout with a single available command (exit), passes it to an instance jsh.JSH, and starts an infinite loop, using the read_and_execute method of the JSH CLI object to interact with the user.

This provides a CLI that looks like the following:

> ?
Possible completions:
  exit
> ex?
Possible completions:
  exit
> exit ?
Possible completions:
  <[Enter]>   Execute this command
> exit

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