python-inquirer

Collection of common interactive command line user interfaces, based on Inquirer.js.

Goal and Philosophy

Born as a Inquirer.js clone, it shares part of the goals and philosophy.

So, Inquirer should ease the process of asking end user questions, parsing, validating answers, managing hierarchical prompts and providing error feedback.

You can download the python-inquirer code from GitHub or download the wheel from Pypi.

Platforms support

Python-inquirer supports mainly UNIX-based platforms (eq. Mac OS, Linux, etc.). Windows has experimental support, please let us know if there are any problems!

Installation

pip install inquirer

Documentation

Documentation has been moved to python-inquirer.readthedocs.io.

But here you have a couple of usage examples:

Text

import re

import inquirer
questions = [
  inquirer.Text('name', message="What's your name"),
  inquirer.Text('surname', message="What's your surname"),
  inquirer.Text('phone', message="What's your phone number",
                validate=lambda _, x: re.match('\+?\d[\d ]+\d', x),
                )
]
answers = inquirer.prompt(questions)

Editor

Like a Text question, but used for larger answers. It opens external text editor which is used to collect the answer.

The environment variables $VISUAL and $EDITOR, can be used to specify which editor should be used. If not present inquirer fallbacks to vim -> emacs -> nano in this order based on availability in the system.

External editor handling is done using great library python-editor.

Example:

import inquirer
questions = [
  inquirer.Editor('long_text', message="Provide long text")
]
answers = inquirer.prompt(questions)

List

Shows a list of choices, and allows the selection of one of them.

Example:

import inquirer
questions = [
  inquirer.List('size',
                message="What size do you need?",
                choices=['Jumbo', 'Large', 'Standard', 'Medium', 'Small', 'Micro'],
            ),
]
answers = inquirer.prompt(questions)

List questions can take one extra argument carousel=False. If set to true, the answers will rotate (back to first when pressing down on last choice, and down to last choice when pressing up on first choice)

Checkbox

Shows a list of choices, with multiple selection.

Example:

import inquirer
questions = [
  inquirer.Checkbox('interests',
                    message="What are you interested in?",
                    choices=['Computers', 'Books', 'Science', 'Nature', 'Fantasy', 'History'],
                    ),
]
answers = inquirer.prompt(questions)

Checkbox questions can take extra argument carousel=False. If set to true, the answers will rotate (back to first when pressing down on last choice, and down to last choice when pressing up on first choice)

Another argument that can be used is locked=. The given choices in the locked argument cannot be removed. This is useful if you want to make clear that a specific option out of the choices must be chosen.

Path

Like Text question, but with builtin validations for working with paths.

Example:

import inquirer
questions = [
  inquirer.Path('log_file',
                 message="Where logs should be located?",
                 path_type=inquirer.Path.DIRECTORY,
                ),
]
answers = inquirer.prompt(questions)

Contributing

Contributions are very welcome. To learn more, see the Contributor Guide.

License

Copyright (c) 2014-2023 Miguel Ángel García (@magmax_en), based on Inquirer.js, by Simon Boudrias (@vaxilart)

Distributed under the terms of the MIT license.