My default starting point for building a new piece of software is to create a command line interface (CLI) app. I’ve even got my own personalized Python cookiecutter template to generate them quickly. Independent of some personal preferences that this supports, like options for logging, thanks to the click argument parsing toollkit, the autogenerated tool immediately integrates well with the wider UNIX ecosystem.
Buuuut, I’ve never gotten a good handle on how to integrate this approach with the modern Web API OAuth+API token methodology. OAuth gives me a headache 😆.
I’m still digesting this article from the folks at notia.ai, entitled “Building an authenticated Python CLI,” but on first read it seems really well done.
When building out the Notia client, we found a real lack of resources around building a persistently authenticated Python library.
To address this, we are going to be building an interactive, authenticated Python CLI that uses the Twitter API to fetch the top Machine Learning tweets of the week! You can see the final result in the video demo above - or you can skip to the final code here.
Building this CLI will let us explore concepts like authenticating a local device between uses, accepting CLI arguments with Click, and displaying our data interactively with Rich.
I’ll definitely be taking their advice in building some future X-to-sqlite applications.
Due credit to Simon Willison for providing the upstream basis of my cookiecutter template.