I love pipenv's custom script shortcuts

Update: I decided the below documentation is a bit naff, so I submitted a PR with some changes, and they were accepted! 🎉 Check it out - https://pipenv.readthedocs.io/en/latest/advanced/#custom-script-shortcuts

From the documentation:

☤ Custom Script Shortcuts

Pipenv supports to customize shortcuts in the scripts section. pipenv run will automatically load it and find the correct command to replace with. Given the Pipfile:

    [scripts]
    printfoo = "python -c \"print('foo')\""

You can type in your terminal to run:

    $ pipenv run printfoo
    foo

/end documentation

And it's really that simple! It runs the script you give it with the pipenv virtual environment context whether you have your pipenv shell activated or not. I have found this super useful for running tests, individual modules, and custom commands.

For example, I use the autopep8 library so I can keep my whitespacing beautiful without the elbow grease of adding extra lines manually, so I have this line in the [scripts] section of my Pipfile:

pep8 = "autopep8 -riv --max-line-length 150"

With this, I can run pipenv run pep8 <file or directory name> and poof! one line at the end of each file, two lines between functions, one line between methods, etc. (Note: I do not actually think 150 is a good max line length, I just don't love where the tool auto-breaks lines, so I'd rather make those choices manually.)

Caveats

As far as I can work out, anything that you could run in your terminal with your pipenv shell activated will work, with the notable exeption that you can't chain commands. I have not been able to get &&, ||, or ; to work. This doesn't really bother me, because if you really need to make a multiple command script, you can make an actual script file and run that from [scripts].

For example, I have a somewhat complex script running my test suite (mostly to add color) and I have a test.sh file in the scripts/ directory. This is what I have in my Pipfile:

[scripts]
tests = "./scripts/test.sh"

I type pipenv run tests and so it does.

If you've not been using this feature of pipenv, give it a try! Let me know what you end up using it for =)

If you've not switch to using pipenv yet, consider this a bit of incentive. I just switched this project from requirements.txt and virtualenv/pyenv and it was not bad at all. It took a bit of persistence to hunt down all the necessary changes in our continuous integration / deployment system, but the changes themselves were not difficult.

Cheers 🥂🐍🙆🏻‍♀️