App Bundles for OS X¶

Overview¶

Since our users are often more amenable to the standard GUI interface, we need a way to quickly provide double-clickable apps so that they do not need to use the terminal. While something like Py2App would do the trick, these are unnesesarily heavy-weight for our needs.

Instead, this package directly constructs .app packages, with the bare minimum required for OS X to recognize them as applications and know how to launch them; they are essentially stubs for either existing commands or Python functions, but with icons.

Each app is specified by its own YAML file. The following keys are accepted:

name

The name of the app. Defaults to the base name of the config file. E.g. A YAML file named toolbox.yml will default to generating an app named toolbox.

icon

The name of an icon in $KS_TOOLS/key_base/2d/icons, or an absolute path. Defaults to the value of name.

entrypoint

Either "package.module" or "package.module:function" specifying which module to import/run

command

A command to run as if from a shell. Defaults to the value of name if entrypoint is also not specified. Cannot be specified along with entrypoint.

As you can see, given the defaults above, it is possible to fully describe an app in this manner with a completely empty YAML file!

Building Apps¶

Apps are build by running the main method of the metatools.apps module. It takes any number of YAML files as arguments, with the last argument being the directory to save the apps into. For example:

python -m metatools.apps *.yml ./

will build all the YAML files in the current directory into apps also in the current directory.