Creating a shell command line application with Python and Click

Question

I'm using click (http://click.pocoo.org/3/) to create a command line application, but I don't know how to create a shell for this application.
Suppose I'm writing a program called test and I have commands called subtest1 and subtest2

I was able to make it work from terminal like:

$ test subtest1
$ test subtest2

But what I was thinking about is a shell, so I could do:

$ test  
>> subtest1  
>> subtest2

Is this possible with click?

Answer 1

This is not impossible with click, but there's no built-in support for that either. The first you would have to do is making your group callback invokable without a subcommand by passing invoke_without_command=True into the group decorator (as described here). Then your group callback would have to implement a REPL. Python has the cmd framework for doing this in the standard library. Making the click subcommands available there involves overriding cmd.Cmd.default, like in the code snippet below. Getting all the details right, like help, should be doable in a few lines.

import click
import cmd

class REPL(cmd.Cmd):
    def __init__(self, ctx):
        cmd.Cmd.__init__(self)
        self.ctx = ctx

    def default(self, line):
        subcommand = cli.commands.get(line)
        if subcommand:
            self.ctx.invoke(subcommand)
        else:
            return cmd.Cmd.default(self, line)

@click.group(invoke_without_command=True)
@click.pass_context
def cli(ctx):
    if ctx.invoked_subcommand is None:
        repl = REPL(ctx)
        repl.cmdloop()

@cli.command()
def a():
    """The `a` command prints an 'a'."""
    print "a"

@cli.command()
def b():
    """The `b` command prints a 'b'."""
    print "b"

if __name__ == "__main__":
    cli()