Why?

It is available everywhere if you install via pip, has cute aliases defined in a JSON file (.dj-config.json) per project, will run as many commands as you want, and defaults to Django management commands if an alias cannot be found.

Commands can be run sequentially by dj (e.g. dj makemigrations migrate). However, calling a long-running process (e.g. dj runserver) will prevent any other commands from being run. For example, dj runserver migrate will never run the migrate command because runserver will block the process.

Example .dj-config.json

{
	"commands": [
		{
			"name": "nice name for the command",
			"help": "help text for the command (optional)",  
			"execute": "shell command to run",
			"long_running": false  // whether the process is expected to execute and exit or run forever (optional, defaults to false)
			"requires_virtualenv": false  // check that a virtual environment is activated before running the command (optional, defaults to false)
		},
		{
			"name": "m",
			"help": "Does the migration dance",
			"execute": "./manage.py makemigrations && ./manage.py migrate",
		},
		{
			"name": "r",
			"help": "Runserver",
			"execute": "./manage.py runserver",
			"long_running": true
		}
	],
	"disable_django_management_command": false  // prevent falling back to a Django management command cannot be found (optional, defaults to false)
}

dj will look in the current directory for .dj-config.json and then in ~/, unless the --config argument is used to specify a particular file location.

Basic arguments and options

• dj --help to see all of the options
• dj --list to see all of the available custom commands
• dj {command_name} to run a custom command or Django management command (e.g. dj migrate)
• dj {command_name} --dry_run to show what commands would run without actually executing them

How to work on the source

1. Clone the repo
2. Run the source locally: poetry run python dj
3. Test the source: poetry run pytest
4. Build and install locally: poetry build && pip3 install --user --upgrade --force-reinstall dist/dj_command-0.3.0-py3-none-any.whl
5. Test with ~/.local/bin/dj migrate
6. Publish the source to pypi: poetry publish --build --username USERNAME --password PASSWORD

Acknowledgements

• poetry: please, please, please continue to wrangle the complexity of 1) creating Python projects, and 2) installing dependencies; seriously, it's baffling out there without you
• click: ridiculously full-featured library to help implement CLI programs in Python; it has all the bells and most of the whistles
• attrs: would you like easy classes in Python? yes, please
• delegator.py: dealing with subprocess is a pain, but delegator hides all the ugly cruft behind a nice API

Prior art

This isn't a new idea and there are a few other implementations out there that do similar things. But, uh, I like mine. 😀

• dj-cmd
• Django-dj
• dj-cli