Writing a new command

There are two types of commands in the CLI project, either add a new command to the CLI tools, that gives a normal terminal command, or build a command for the Mailman custom shell.

Writing a new command for Command tools

To write a new command for the command line tools, the following steps are to be followed.

• Decide a command name and arguments expected
• Decide whether the command comes under a scope. Currently

the following scopes are supported

• users
• domains
• preferences
• lists

The new command can either be under any of these scopes or can exist independently without a scope.

• If the new command BAR is to be added to an existing scope FOO, the command would look like FOO BAR, where FOO is the action and BAR is the scope

• Add a new parser to the action parser as:

  new_cmd = action.add_parser('FOO')
  

  Add the scope as follows:

  scope = new_cmd.add_subparser(dest='scope')
  FOO_BAR = scope.add_parser('BAR')
  

• Add the arguments as follows:

  FOO_BAR.add_argument('-x','--xxxx',help='<help text>',[required=True/False])
  

• Add the action method in the core/bar.py file, to the Bar class. In effect, the action method would be core.bar.Bar.action. Note that the function name must be same as the action name

• If there is no specific scope, skip the scope parser and add the action the Misc class under core/misc.py. The action would be core.misc.Misc.action

Writing a new command for the Shell

To write a new shell command, first add a new parser for the command to the client/parsers directory.

Add the command method to the client/shell.py

Import the parser in the corresponding method and parse the user input, present in the self.line attribute to obtain the arguments. Perform the action.