clamp

CLI Alias tool with variable substitution

(this is a heavily bastardized version derived from https://github.com/seiferteric/clamp)

From the original: "This tool allows you to bind a string to a CLI command. It also allows for variable that are passed as cli parameters. This is really handy for testing an HTTP API by wrapping curl commands."

I had the idea to do something like this a while back, found someone had done something similar, but there were a few things I wanted to change:

• Needed to run it on windows shell, cygwin, and OS X
• Wanted to minimize dependencies for quick deploy
• Wanted to be able to edit the config file directly, without lots of escaping (non-json format config)
• Wanted to be able to pull in environment variables (with defaults)
• Wanted to be able to recursively call commands within the script

So I set out to hack away at the original script and this is what I came up with.

.clamp files

Clamp expects a file file in the current directory called .clamp where it can find the command aliases. This allows you to create different .clamp files for different projects.

This fork uses .INI style files in the format of SafeConfigParser, rather than JSON, so the configuration documentation from the original is quite different. Unlike the original clamp, new commands are added by editing this file with a text editor, there is no command-line switch to allow for adding commands. For the most part you won't have to escape anything when editing the .clamp file, but beware of semi-colons that are preceded by spaces may start inline comments, due to the parser rules. See the example .clamp file for more information

Install

Manual process currently.. Sorry. I'm a python neophyte, and was in a hurry. Written for python3, but should work on older pythons (tested on 2.7)

Windows usage

Windows users may want to create a .BAT file or .CMD file to invoke the script and put it in your PATH, i.e. something like

@echo off
c:\python34\python.exe "c:\somedir\clamp" %*

TODO

• general clean up, there are a few hacky things in the script currently
• finish the readme instructions
• provide a mechanism for injectable converters, (e.g. url-encoding parameters, etc)