- cross-posted to:
- python@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- python@programming.dev
python -m http.server
came in handy so many times!@wasabi @learnbyexample one of my favorite super lazy ways to share a file
Easier than grepping, you can just look at the standard library docs: https://docs.python.org/3/library/
How is that easier? It doesn’t look like it provides a list of which modules have a
__name__ == "__main__"
block.No. But, it does provide a list of all stdlib libraries and those, like gzip, that are intended to be compatible with the CLI tend to have explicit documentation showing usage (ex. https://docs.python.org/3/library/gzip.html) and provides any other contextual info related to using the library.
Don’t get me wrong, grepping through the code is a great way of building skills needed as a professional. Really, I have to do this kind of thing multiple times every week at work. It is, however, also worth noting that Python only uses an “honor system” for public/private functions, methods, and classes so modules having an “if name == ‘main’” block doesn’t necessarily mean that they are appropriate to use as CLI tools. They might be but, without documentation to back it up, it’s an “at your own risk” situation.
I use
json.tool
a lot to format JSON directly in vim. Simply highlight the text you want to format and run:!python3 -m json.tool
. There are probably plugins to do this too, but doing it this way is probably the simplest, unless vim has a built-in for it.Could probably do the same with
:! jq .
It’s a bit shorter.Yeah, I knew someone was going to say that. Usually it’s more likely that Python is installed than jq - especially on servers. But yes, that would definitely work too.
Sure, I’m just not sure when I’d ever run into that. Either I’m doing it a lot and installing
jq
is reasonable, or I’m not allowed on the server anyway and need to copy/paste from logs.I used to use
python -m json.tool
a lot, but I haven’t needed to in many years.
Pro tip: you can ignore filenames with ripgrep using
-g "!test/"
. That should speed things up a bit.Nice work!
python -m http.server
has been a very useful tool to me, to test if a server is accessible.CLITools can be hard to find, but when you do it’s worth the effort.