I mostly work on django projects and as a dev who likes shortcuts, I wanted to have an alias of pm
for python manage.py
.
I could’ve just added
alias pm="python manage.py"
inside of my config but I was working on different projects where manage.py
was located in different folders. Typical projects have it located under root while some projects have it under src/manage.py
.
What I needed was a way to find where the manage.py
was located and use that so I can do
$ pm runserver # OR
$ pm shell # OR
$ pm <command>
Here’s my first attempt:
$ find . -type f -name "manage.py" -exec python {} \; -quit
What this does is find
under the current directory .
a type of file -type f
with a name of manage.py
-name "manage.py"
. And then, for the file you found execute a command -exec
The {}
is the current file name returned by find
command.
In our case it’s gonna be:
$ python ./src/manage.py
The -quit
is optional in most cases of using the find exec
command since it it exits immediately after the first match.
But there’s a problem with that approach. If we just do:
$ alias pm="find . -type f -name "manage.py" -exec python {} \; -quit"
$ pm runserver
We get:
$ find: runserver: unknown primary or operator
In order to fix that, we have to wrap it inside a function so that it could take arguments:
$ alias pm='f(){ find . -type f -name "manage.py" -exec python {} "$@" \; -quit; unset -f f; }; f'
The $@
stands for all other arguments you passed. You can add that inside of your .bashrc
or .zshrc
.
If you are using fish
like me, I have this file inside my ~/.config/fish/functions/pm.fish
function pm --description "Find and execute manage.py"
command find . -type f -name "manage.py" -exec python {} $argv \; -quit
end
Now it works fine!
$ pm runserver
Watching for file changes with StatReloader
Performing system checks...
System check identified no issues (2 silenced).
November 16, 2020 - 06:16:50
Django version 2.2.17, using settings 'myproject.settings'
Starting development server at http://127.0.0.1:8000/
Quit the server with CONTROL-C.
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