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# TGExt.Command

TurboGears uses the Paste commands system to create command-line entry points that, for example, set up your database or start your server. When you get to larger projects, however, you will often have other things you need to do “in the context of your application” from the command line, such as periodic imports of data, or cron’d database management tasks.

Paste’s command system is well documented, but it can take quite a bit of poking around to find out how to get SQLAlchemy, and TurboGears configured so that code that looks in tg.config gets the right values, and SQLAlchemy has access to your models.

This extension (tgext.command) is an attempt to make it easier to create new TG command-line commands.

    $ easy_install tgext.command

To use the extension, you will create a BaseCommand class like this that will be shared by all of your command-line scripts.

    from tgext.command import tgcommand
    class BaseCommand( tgcommand.TGCommand ):
        def import_model( self ):
            from example import model
            return model

This command-class would then serve as the base command for each of your “real” commands. For example, a command that iterates through all users showing their user_name property:

    class Hello(BaseCommand):
        def db_command( self, engine ):
            from example.model import User,Group, DBSession
            for user in DBSession.query( User ):
                print 'User',user.user_name

As with regular Paste commands you have to register your TGCommands in your application’s setup.py (in the setup() call), like so:

    entry_points="""
    [paste.paster_command]
    hellocommand = example.commands.hello:Hello
    """

You will need to re-run setup.py develop to get the command to be available). Note that a simple approach which does not support PID-file exclusion, paster registration/command-line-parsing and the like is documented in Command Line Scripts.