There are many ways to structure and document your DevOps process. A fundamental component of my DevOps process is a robust command line interface. My preferred way of building a command line interface is using the Python Package called Invoke.

Invoke provides me with a --list of available commands

Invoke also provides me with additional --help text

In order to get the above command line interface I just need to define Python functions with docstrings and mark them with the Invoke @task annotation.

Some reasons to use Invoke as your CLI framework are:

• Configuration management through use of environment variables, arguments, and config files
• Automatic help menus and argument parsing with validation
• Tasks can be run from any directory under the project root
• Invoke and Python can be more easily used in a cross-platform environment
• Easier debugging using the Python debugger and more flexible printing
• Python is more widely known and understood among developers
• Python gives access to a wide variety of packages to use

I can even use the command directly from the command palette in VS Code using the VS Code Invoke Extension

For an example of using Invoke (and why not to use Make) see this article.

Invoke is very, very powerfull and robust. For the full details see http://www.pyinvoke.org/.