Installation

If you are lazy, just perform

$ pip install plac

which will install the module on your system.

If you prefer to install the full distribution from source, including the documentation, download the tarball, unpack it and run

$ python setup.py install

in the main directory, possibly as superuser.

Testing

Run

$ python doc/test_plac.py

You will see several apparent errors, but this is right, since the tests are checking for several error conditions. The important thing is that you get at the a line like

Executed XX tests OK

Quickstart

Here is a script that does some processing on a database table:

# updatedb.py
from datetime import datetime

def main(dsn, table='product', today=datetime.today()):
    "Do something on the database"
    print(dsn, table, today)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    import plac; plac.call(main)

Here is the help message automatically generated by plac:

$ python updatedb.py -h
usage: updatedb.py [-h] dsn [table] [today]

Do something on the database

positional arguments:
  dsn
  table       [product]
  today       [2019-07-28 07:18:20.054708]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit

Nevertheless to say, plac can do a lot more, up to the creation of domain-specific languages(!)

Documentation

It is hosted here: http://micheles.github.io/plac