Comparisons and features

There is a lot of packages out there that solve the same problem as clig.

The first one that I have tested which uses a similar approach and is very popular was typer. It is a very usefull, modern and complete package, with a large comunity, but it lacked some features I wanted for clig, specially related to docstrings.

Another very complete package that also solves typer problems is cyclopts. To be honest, I almost gave up making this module after knowing cyclopts, because it is really a very good package.

However, clig has some advantages that may be important in some scenarios:

1. It is a single module, with no dependencies, pure python. Actually, you can just download it, place in some folder and import in your script.

2. It has some flexibility on the use of docstrings and generation of argument flags.

3. It uses argparse under the hood, with the concepts of argparse. So you don’t need to learn anything new (if you already know how to use the stdlib module argparse).

List of packages

A lot of packages out there solves the same problem as clig, i.e., generates a CLI. But they have basically 2 different approaches.

In the first approach, the API tries to create a proxy object that can be used by functions subsequently. So, the interface is decoupled from the implementation. This is the strategy taken by argparse/optparse in the stdlib. Some packages that follows this strategy are listed below:

• argparse

• optparse

• clout

• simple-parsing

• dataparsers

• datargs

• dargparser

• argparse-dataclasses

• argparse-dataclass

In the second approach, the interface is coupled with the implementation. It is useful when the implementation itself is already documented (with type declaration and/or functions docstrings), so the interface generation doesn’t require additional re-work. This is the strategy taken by clig. Some other packages that follows this strategy are listed below:

• click

• typer

• cyclopts

• fire

Download the module

Since clig is made of a single module, you can just download the clig.py module to use in some restrict environment, place it in your path and import it.

• Download the module with curl

curl -L -o clig.py https://raw.githubusercontent.com/diogo-rossi/clig/refs/heads/main/src/clig/clig.py

• Download the module with wget

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/diogo-rossi/clig/refs/heads/main/src/clig/clig.py -O clig.py

• Download the module with PowerShell (Windows)

iwr -uri "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/diogo-rossi/clig/refs/heads/main/src/clig/clig.py" -out "clig.py"