Command Line Interface¶

Installing recad installs the recad script, a command line interface, in your virtualenv. Executed from the terminal, this script gives access to built-in, extension, and application-defined commands. The --help option will give more information about any commands and options.

recad can output graphics to the console. You will need a terminal that has the graphics capabilities like Kitty or wezterm

Application Discovery¶

--search: The given name is imported, automatically detecting an app (app or application) or factory (create_app or make_app).

While --app supports a variety of options for specifying your application, most use cases should be simple. Here are the typical values:

--app hello: The given name is imported, automatically detecting an app (app or application) or factory (create_app or make_app).

--app has three parts: an optional path that sets the current working directory, a Python file or dotted import path, and an optional variable name of the instance or factory. If the name is a factory, it can optionally be followed by arguments in parentheses. The following values demonstrate these parts:

--app src/hello: Sets the current working directory to src then imports hello.
--app hello.web: Imports the path hello.web.
--app hello:app2: Uses the app2 Flask instance in hello.
--app 'hello:create_app("dev")': The create_app factory in hello is called with the string 'dev' as the argument.

If --app is not set, the command will try to import “app” or “wsgi” (as a “.py” file, or package) and try to detect an application instance or factory.

Within the given import, the command looks for an application instance named app or application, then any application instance. If no instance is found, the command looks for a factory function named create_app or make_app that returns an instance.

If parentheses follow the factory name, their contents are parsed as Python literals and passed as arguments and keyword arguments to the function. This means that strings must still be in quotes.