Sphinx Integration

cliff supports integration with Sphinx by way of a Sphinx directives.

.. autoprogram-cliff:: namespace

Automatically document an instance of cliff.command.Command, including a description, usage summary, and overview of all options.

.. autoprogram-cliff:: openstack.compute.v2
   :command: server add fixed ip

One argument is required, corresponding to the namespace that the command(s) can be found in. This is generally defined in the entry_points section of either setup.cfg or setup.py. Refer to the example below for more information.

In addition, the following directive options can be supplied:

:command:

The name of the command, as it would appear if called from the command line without the executable name. This will be defined in setup.cfg or setup.py albeit with underscores. This is optional and fnmatch-style wildcarding is supported. Refer to the example below for more information.

See also

The autoprogram_cliff_application configuration option.

:ignored:

A comma-separated list of options to exclude from documentation for this option. This is useful for options that are of low value.

See also

The autoprogram_cliff_ignored configuration option.

The following global configuration values are supported. These should be placed in conf.py:

autoprogram_cliff_application

The top-level application name, which will be prefixed before all commands. This is generally defined in the console_scripts attribute of the entry_points section of either setup.cfg or setup.py. Refer to the example below for more information.

For example:

autoprogram_cliff_application = 'my-sample-application'

Defaults to ''

See also

The :command: directive option.

autoprogram_cliff_ignored

A global list of options to exclude from documentation. This can be used to prevent duplication of common options, such as those used for pagination, across all options.

For example:

autoprogram_cliff_ignored = ['--help', '--page', '--order']

Defaults to ['--help']

See also

The :ignored: directive option.

See also

Module sphinxcontrib.autoprogram

An equivalent library for use with plain-old argparse applications.

Module sphinx-click

An equivalent library for use with click applications.

Important

The autoprogram-cliff directive emits code-block snippets marked up as shell code. This requires pygments >= 0.6.

Example

Take a sample setup.cfg file, which is based on the setup.cfg for the python-openstackclient project:

[entry_points]
console_scripts =
    openstack = openstackclient.shell:main

openstack.compute.v2 =
    host_list = openstackclient.compute.v2.host:ListHost
    host_set = openstackclient.compute.v2.host:SetHost
    host_show = openstackclient.compute.v2.host:ShowHost

This will register three commands - host list, host set and host show - for a top-level executable called openstack. To document the first of these, add the following:

.. autoprogram-cliff:: openstack.compute.v2
   :command: host list

You could also register all of these at once like so:

.. autoprogram-cliff:: openstack.compute.v2
   :command: host *

Finally, if these are the only commands available in that namespace, you can omit the :command: parameter entirely:

.. autoprogram-cliff:: openstack.compute.v2

In all cases, you should add the following to your conf.py to ensure all usage examples show the full command name:

autoprogram_cliff_application = 'openstack'