Prompt for missing required parameters about cyclopts

[BrianPugh]

Cyclopts purposely limited its responsibility-scope to just the initial command CLI parsing. Other libraries are quite good at prompting the user for more data. My personal favorite is Questionary. With Questionary, your program may look like:

import questionary
from cyclopts import App

app = App()

@app.default
def main(password: Optional[str] = None):
    if password is None:
        password = questionary.password("What's your password?").ask()
    # Do stuff with the password here.

[marcelbrueckner]

Oh, that was fast :) Thanks. I thought about that already, but then the nice "required" hint in the CLI's help isn't displayed anymore.

However, I've now experimented with the Parameters and discovered that I can set required=True.
This way (in combination with setting a default value) I have the corresponding hint in the CLI's help,
but without the error when the parameter isn't passed :)

So your code finally resembles to the following:

from cyclopts import App
# I will use rich instead of questionary because cyclopts depends on rich anyway
from rich.prompt import Prompt

app = App()

@app.default
def main(password: Annotated[Optional[str], Parameter(required=True)] = None):
    if password is None:
        password = Prompt.ask("What's your password?", password=True)
    # Do stuff with the password here.

[BrianPugh]

Thanks for the use-case example!

However, I've now experimented with the Parameters and discovered that I can set required=True.
This way (in combination with setting a default value) I have the corresponding hint in the CLI's help,
but without the error when the parameter isn't passed :)

I think this behavior is technically a bug in Cyclopts's side, so I can't exactly recommend on relying on that behavior. I'll have to investigate more later when I have a moment. I'm going to keep this open until I provide some more feedback.

The docstring for required:

      Parameter must be supplied.
      Defaults to required if parameter does not have a default from the function signature.

I personally don't think it's a valid use-case to mark an item as required in the help-page if it's not actually required at invocation time. However I would definitely like to hear your opinion!

[marcelbrueckner]

I personally don't think it's a valid use-case to mark an item as required in the help-page if it's not actually required at invocation time. However I would definitely like to hear your opinion!

Given the user wants to invoke my (future) tool in a non-interactive environment, the parameter needs to be passed at invocation time. Hence for me, that's "required" and I would like to express that in my CLI help in a visually coherent way.

For example, other (sub)commands of my tool will require non-password'ish parameters that I don't ask for interactively if missing. They will have the red "required" hint in CLI's help and I want the same for the password parameter.

[BrianPugh]

I suppose the opposite (required=False without a default value being provided) makes even less sense.

Ok, I'm on board! I'm just going to keep this issue open until I update documentation and add tests that enforces this behavior. Thanks!

[BrianPugh]

I updated the docs and fixed a minor related bug in #146. This is now part of the v2.5.1 release. Thank you!