Packaging Python Scripts into CLI Commands

Introduction

Today I want to show you how you can turn a python script from this:

$ python3 coolscript.py

To this:

$ coolscript

How It’s Done

How you are able to change a python script into a full fledged CLI command is by leveraging setup.py. I will demonstrate this by creating a program that will perform a caesar cipher on any text you provide it.

Project Structure

First we will need to create our projects directory:

$ mkdir caesar 
$ cd caesar 
$ mkdir caesar 
$ touch setup.py 
$ touch caesar/__init__.py 
$ touch caesar/caesar.py

And what we should be left with is a directory structure that looks like this:

caesar/ 
|-- caesar 
| |-- __init__.py 
| `-- caesar.py 
`-- setup.py

Script

Once you have the directory setup we will create the script in caesar.py. The objective of this tutorial is not to teach you how to create the script however I will add it below if you are interested.