No way to pass free arguments to a specific place

[ItsDrike]

With shell scripts, it's possible to do something like: python -m robot --pythonpath . -d ./outptut "$@" tests, so that when you call a script, the passed arguments are forwarded to the command in a specific location.

However with poe a task like:

[tool.poe.tasks.test]
help = "Run all tests"
cmd = "python -m robot --pythonpath . -d ./output ./tests"

Any passed arguments will simply be appended to the end of the command. This isn't ideal, as some CLI tools only support usage like: robot [options] paths, which means any positional arguments left after the options are interpreted as paths. This means that running for example: robot --pythonpath . ./tests -d ./output wouldn't work, and I'd get an error that it couldn't find -d as a path.

I'd love to see a feature that would allow for me to pass arguments to a specific place in my command.

[nat-n]

Hi @ItsDrike,

I agree this is an issue, but I've not managed to find a good solution yet. One difficulty is that I haven't found a robust way to pass arguments to a shell child process (to populate $@ within the shell) where the script content is being passed via stdin (which is how shell tasks work). Rethinking shell tasks as discussed in #64 might help, but that's a way off on the roadmap.

Thinking allowed here, maybe just having a way to capture extra arguments (either when there are no args defined, or when provided after the -- on the command line) and being able to specifically inject them at a certain point in a command rather than append them to the end is all that's needed? Need to think this through a bit...

I'm open to ideas.

That said, one imperfect solution that might just work for you is to define a positional arg on your task that accepts multiple values. For example given a task like:

[tool.poe.tasks.show-args]
cmd = """
python -c "import sys; print(sys.argv[1:])" being $all_args end
"""
args = [{ name = "all_args", positional = true, multiple = true }]

And a command like:

poe show-args middle "multiple words" -- and then some

The result will be:

Poe => python -c import sys; print(sys.argv[1:]) begin middle multiple words end and then some
['begin', 'middle', 'multiple', 'words', 'end', 'and', 'then', 'some']

A couple of points to pay attention to:

1. you can also accept multiple values for cli options, but args multiple must come first in the command. Accepting multiple values for multiple args gets complicated quickly
2. the multiple values are essentially just passed as a whitespace delimited string which is then lexed into multiple words inside the task. If you don't want this then put quotes around the "${variable}" just like in a normal POSIX shell.

[roniemartinez]

I was hoping to migrate from Makefile to a better tool and found this library.

I found a similar limitation with regards to running command inside a docker container. For example when running Django commands, I have to do docker-compose run --rm server bash -c "python manage.py makemigrations" but most of the commands need extra arguments to be passed. This is not possible with the tool because we need to put the command inside quotes/double quotes.

I also used go-tasks for a while and I think I am looking for something similar to {{.CLI_ARGS}} (https://taskfile.dev/usage/#forwarding-cli-arguments-to-commands)

[merlinz01]

I agree that poe should have a way to do this.

You can put arguments in an environment variable and use it wherever the arguments are going to be passed:

[tool.poe.tasks.test]
sequence = [
    { cmd = 'pytest $TEST_ARGS' },
    { cmd = 'some other command' }
]

TEST_ARGS="-n auto" poe test

Which isn't very elegant but at least it works.