Quickie - A CLI tool for quick tasks

Getting Started

Installing

Quickie can be installed either on a per-project basis and globally.

For projects it is recommended to use a virtual environment and install via pip:

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install quickie-runner
qck --help

For global installation, you can install quickie-runner-global instead. It will add quickie-runner as a dependency, but also add a qckg executable, which will run global tasks by default. This allows us to run our global tasks from any project without conflicts.

For global installation it is recommended to use pipx, as it will install it in an isolated environment:

pipx install quickie-runner-global
qckg --help

If you have any issues with the quickie package missing when running qckg, you can inject it manually:

pipx inject quickie-runner-global quickie-runner

See the pipx

Tab completion

Tab completion is available for bash and zsh. It depends on the argcomplete package, which should have been installed with quickie.

To enable tab completion for quickie, add the following line to your .bashrc or .zshrc:

eval "$(register-python-argcomplete qck)"
eval "$(register-python-argcomplete qckg)"

If you get the following error in the zsh shell:

complete:13: command not found: compdef

You can fix it by adding the following line to your .zshrc (before the line that registers the completion):

autoload -Uz compinit && compinit

Usage

Per-project tasks are configured under a __quickie.py or __quickie python module in the current directory. If using a __quickie directory, the tasks should be defined in the __quickie/__init__.py file.

Global tasks on the other hand should be defined in the Quickie module in the user's directory.

Tasks are defined as classes, though factory functions are also supported.

Why define tasks in Python?

While many existing similar tools use YAML, TOML or custom formats to define tasks, quickie uses Python for the following reasons:

• Built-in syntax highlighting and linting
• Supported by most editors and IDEs
• Easy to use and understand
• Extensible and powerful

Quick Example

Here is a simple example of a __quickie.py file:

from quickie import arg, script, task

@task(name=["hello", "greet"])
@arg("name", help="The name to greet")
def hello(name):
    """Greet someone"""  # added as the task help
    print(f"Hello, {name}!")


@script(extra_args=True)
def echo():
    return " ".join(["echo", *args])

You can run the hello task with the following command:

$ qck hello world
Hello, world!
$ qck greet world
Hello, world!

And the script task with:

$ qck echo Hello there
Hello there