For the familiar and impatient: Loghetti has moved to github and has been updated. An official release hasn’t been made yet, but cloning the repository and installing argparse will result in perfectly usable code. More on the way.
For the uninitiated, Loghetti is a command line log sifting/reporting tool written in Python to parse Apache Combined Format log files. It was initially released in late 2008 on Google Code. I used loghetti for my own work, which involved sifting log files with tens of millions of lines. Needless to say, it needed to be reasonably fast, and give me a decent amount of control over the data returned. It also had to be easy to use; just because it’s fast doesn’t mean I want to retype my command because of confusing options or the like.
So, loghetti is reasonably fast, and reasonably easy, and gives a reasonable amount of control to the end user. It’s certainly a heckuva lot easier than writing regular expressions into ‘grep’ and doing the ol’ ‘press & pray’.
Loghetti suffered a bit over the last several months because one of its dependencies broke backward compatibility with earlier releases. Such is the nature of development. Last night I finally got to crack open the code for loghetti again, and was able to put a solution together in an hour or so, which surprised me.
I was able to completely replace Doug Hellmann’s CommandLineApp with argparse very, very quickly. Of course, CommandLineApp was taking on responsibility for actually running the app itself (the main loghetti class was a subclass of CommandLineApp), and was dealing with the options, error handling, and all that jazz. It’s also wonderfully generic, and is written so that pretty much any app, regardless of the type of options it takes, could run as a CommandLineApp.
argparse was not a fast friend of mine. I stumbled a little over whether I should just update the namespace of my main class via argparse, or if I should pass in the Namespace object, or… something else. Eventually, I got what I needed, and not much more.
So loghetti now requires argparse, which is not part of the standard library, so why replace what I knew with some other (foreign) library? Because argparse is, as I understand it, slated for inclusion in Python 3, at which point optparse will be deprecated.
So, head on over to the GitHub repo, give it a spin, and send your pull requests and patches. Let the games begin!