The Best Way to Make Command-line Interfaces in Python

How to write easy-to-use, intuitive Python programs

Command-line interface (CLI):

A command-line interface or command language interpreter, also known as a command-line user interface, console user interface and character user interface, is a means of interacting with a computer program where the user issues a command to the program in the form of successive lines of text.

You can make your program powerful and interactive by creating a command-line interface (CLI). A CLI allows you to take in command-line arguments (information that follows the program’s name on the command line of the operating system) to add additional features to your program, making your code both easy to use and flexible. Depending on the program, these arguments can be used to add additional features such as viewing help documentation, specifying an output file, or enabling test features that may be buggy for normal use.

When I first started programming in Python, I almost exclusively collected user input interactively like this:

def main():
    first = input(“Enter your first name:”)
    last = input(“Enter your last name:”)
    print(first + ' ' + last)