Building My First Python CLI Tool: A Simple Day Counter to Track Time

This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Adam Malsagov

Hello DEV community! 👋

I recently started working on personal projects, writing small scripts and sharing them on GitHub. Before that, I mostly followed tutorials and read programming books, but building my own projects helped me learn faster and grasp concepts more deeply. As the next step in my learning journey, I developed my first command-line interface (CLI) tool, Day Counter, which I’m excited to share.

What is Day Counter?

Day Counter is a lightweight CLI tool in Python that tracks time in days, hours, and minutes since a specific event. The program stores time in a JSON file and displays the elapsed time. I started with a simple script and expanded it into a CLI tool to deepen my understanding of command-line applications.

Features

• Command-line arguments:
  • --view: Check the current time elapsed since the event.
  • --reset: Reset or initialize the counter.
• Persistent data storage:
  • Saves the timestamp data to a JSON file, so your counter keeps track even after closing the program.

How It Works

Using Day Counter is straightforward. To start tracking time since an event, run:

python day_counter.py --reset

to start or reset the counter. You can check the counter anytime with:

python day_counter.py --view

to see how much time has passed.

Example of running the Day Counter CLI tool

Conclusion

Day Counter is a simple CLI tool that introduced me to command-line applications. It provided a solid foundation for creating more advanced CLI tools in the future, with more command line arguments and the use of third-party libraries.

GitHub Repository

If you want to try it out or check out the code, here’s the repository: https://github.com/adam-malsagov/day-counter-cli

Thanks for reading!

This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Adam Malsagov

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