Invoke is a Python (2.6+ and 3.2+) task execution tool & library, drawing inspiration from various sources to arrive at a powerful & clean feature set.

• 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 run, task
  
  @task
  def clean(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:
          run("rm -rf %s" % pattern)
  
  @task
  def build(docs=False):
      run("python setup.py build")
      if docs:
          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
  

• 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.

For documentation, including detailed installation information, please see http://docs.pyinvoke.org. Post-install usage information may be found in invoke --help.

You can install the development version via pip install invoke==dev.