Global State

Unlike Cyclopts or Typer, with arguably you directly jump into decorating functions:

import arguably


@arguably.command
def some_function(required, not_required=2, *others: int, option: float = 3.14):
    """
    this function is on the command line!

    Args:
        required: a required argument
        not_required: this one isn't required, since it has a default value
        *others: all the other positional arguments go here
        option: [-x] keyword-only args are options, short name is in brackets
    """
    print(f"{required=}, {not_required=}, {others=}, {option=}")


if __name__ == "__main__":
    arguably.run()

With Arguably, no application object is created. This immediately becomes an issue if you use a library that uses arguably on import.

Lets consider the following file:

# library_using_arguably.py
import arguably


@arguably.command
def some_library_function(name):
    print(f"{name=}")


if __name__ == "__main__":
    arguably.run()

$ python library_using_arguably.py foo
name='foo'

So this by itself works fine, but lets create another script that imports this library:

import arguably
import library_using_arguably


@arguably.command
def my_function(name):
    print(f"{name=}")


if __name__ == "__main__":
    arguably.run()

Now, lets check the help screen:

$ python my-script.py --help
usage: my-script.py [-h] command ...

positional arguments:
  command
    some-library-function
    my-function

options:
  -h, --help               show this help message and exit

The two CLI applications got combined into one, making Arguably dangerous for CLIs that are also libraries.