Welcome to Invoke!

Invoke is a Python library for managing shell-oriented subprocesses and organizing executable Python code into CLI-invokable tasks. It draws inspiration from various sources (make/rake, Fabric 1.x, etc) to arrive at a powerful & clean feature set.

To find out what’s new in this version of Invoke, please see the changelog.

The project maintainer keeps a roadmap on his website.

This website covers project information for Invoke such as the changelog, contribution guidelines, development roadmap, news/blog, and so forth. Detailed usage and API documentation can be found at our code documentation site, docs.pyinvoke.org.

Please see below for a high level intro, or the navigation on the left for the rest of the site content.

What is Invoke?

• Like Ruby’s Rake tool and Invoke’s own predecessor Fabric 1.x, it provides a clean, high level API for running shell commands and defining/organizing task functions from a tasks.py file:

  from invoke import task
  
  @task
  def clean(c, docs=False, bytecode=False, extra=''):
      patterns = ['build']
      if docs:
          patterns.append('docs/_build')
      if bytecode:
          patterns.append('**/*.pyc')
      if extra:
          patterns.append(extra)
      for pattern in patterns:
          c.run("rm -rf {}".format(pattern))
  
  @task
  def build(c, docs=False):
      c.run("python setup.py build")
      if docs:
          c.run("sphinx-build docs docs/_build")
  

• From GNU Make, it inherits an emphasis on minimal boilerplate for common patterns and the ability to run multiple tasks in a single invocation:

  $ invoke clean build
  

• Where Fabric 1.x considered the command-line approach the default mode of use, Invoke (and tools built on it) are equally at home embedded in your own Python code or a REPL:

  >>> from invoke import run
  >>> cmd = "pip install -r requirements.txt"
  >>> result = run(cmd, hide=True, warn=True)
  >>> print(result.ok)
  True
  >>> print(result.stdout.splitlines()[-1])
  Successfully installed invocations-0.13.0 pep8-1.5.7 spec-1.3.1
  

• Following the lead of most Unix CLI applications, it offers a traditional flag-based style of command-line parsing, deriving flag names and value types from task signatures (optionally, of course!):

  $ invoke clean --docs --bytecode build --docs --extra='**/*.pyo'
  $ invoke clean -d -b build --docs -e '**/*.pyo'
  $ invoke clean -db build -de '**/*.pyo'
  

• Like many of its predecessors, it offers advanced features as well – namespacing, task aliasing, before/after hooks, parallel execution and more.