How I made the open-dev.to CLI app with Python

Since I began learning Python, I've been amazed by how much you can do with it, and how easy it actually is once you get comfortable with it. I've always loved working on the terminal, so to make my learning a bit fun, I learned how to make cli apps with Click and made a Chuck Norris jokes app late last year:

norris-cli

Kelvin Wangonya ・ Dec 27 '18 ・ 1 min read

#showdev #beginners #python #cli

I posted the app on PyPi and as a Python beginner, you can just imagine my joy on seeing something I did up on PyPi. PyPi! 😄 Awesome feeling.

Then yesterday, I had to take a break from work and decided to open Dev.to. I like to have my browser closed if I don't require it for whatever I'm doing to avoid distractions. So I switched workspaces, opened up my browser, clicked on the Dev.to bookmark and there I was. The idea just popped into my head: I could bypass all this if I had one command to open dev.to from the terminal. I was already on my terminal before anyway so this seemed like a good idea 😄. Of course, this could be done for any website - I just thought of Dev.to because that's what made me go through the process in the first place.

Open Dev.to from your terminal 🎉

Kelvin Wangonya ・ Apr 9 '19 ・ 1 min read

#showdev #python #cli

As usual, the community was very supportive!

Tomas Forsman • Apr 9 '19

This was fun =) You should add a bit about the process, what you needed to make this happen and how to make a package to share.

Kelvin Wangonya • Apr 10 '19

I'll do that on the next post. Thanks! 😊

So here's how I did it.

In case you want to follow along, now's the time to create a new directory, cd into it, and create your virtual environment.

$ mkdir open-dev.to
$ cd open-dev.to
$ virtualenv venv # pip install virtualenv if you don't have it
$ source venv/bin/activate
(venv) $ mkdir app
(venv) $ touch app/__init__.py # this is where we'll write our code
(venv) $ touch requirements.txt # this will hold the project's requirements

click & the webbrowser module

At the heart of this whole thing is these two lines of code:

import click
import webbrowser

webbrowser provides the powers to open the browser, and click makes it a cli app.

webbrowser comes with python so all we need to install is click.

(venv) $ pip install click
(venv) $ pip freeze > requirements.txt # add the installed module to our requirements file

Now that we have what we need, we can go ahead to write the code. Add the following code to app/__init__.py. I'll explain what each line does.

import click
import webbrowser

@click.command()
@click.option('--tag', '-t', help='add a tag')
def main(tag):
    """
    Open a new dev.to browser tab on the browser
    """
    if tag:
        url = 'https://dev.to/t/{}'.format(tag)
    else:
        url = 'https://dev.to'

    webbrowser.open(url, new=2)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

It's really that simple! Even a beginner would be able to make sense of what this code does.

@click.command()
This click decorator converts the main() function into a cli command. Without it, it would just be a normal python function. But with it, it becomes command that can be invoked as a command line utility.

@click.option('--tag', '-t', help='add a tag')
@click.option() extends the command to be able to accept extra arguments. In this case, --tag or its shorthand version -t is allowed. The help text explains what the argument does.

def main(tag):
This is our app's entrypoint, where all the magic happens. The function (now a command) takes an optional tag argument, which determines the url to be opened as seen in the if else a few lines below it.

"""Open a new dev.to browser tab on the browser"""

webbrowser.open(url, new=2)
Opens the requested url. new=2 makes sure this is done in a new tab.

And finally, the if __name__ block runs the main() function when the script runs.

Having the code above, just run the __init__.py to see it work.

$ python app/__init__.py

A new Dev.to tab should automatically open on your browser.

$ python app/__init__.py --help
Usage: __init__.py [OPTIONS]

  Open a new dev.to browser tab on the browser

Options:
  -t, --tag TEXT  add a tag
  --help          Show this message and exit.

Let's try out passing in a tag.

$ python app/__init__.py --tag react

https://dev.to/t/react should be opened 😀.

We don't want to keep running python app/__init__.py everytime though. In the next post, I'll show how to use setuptools to bundle the script so we can install it locally and use the simple dev.to command to run the script instead of the long python app/__init__.py. I'll also show how to publish a package on PyPi.