I Built a Python CLI Toolbox Instead of Writing One-Off Scripts
Whenever I ask an AI assistant to do a small task, it writes a quick Python script for me. Convert an image. Compress a PDF. Convert a CSV to Excel. The script works, I use it once, and then it disappears. At some point I thought: Why keep asking for one-off scripts when I could build my own reusable toolbox? So I did. Toolbox is a small Python CLI with utilities for the file and image tasks I…
A Python developer built a command-line interface (CLI) toolbox to replace one-off scripts for common file and image tasks. The project, named Toolbox, includes utilities for converting CSV files to Excel, manipulating images, and compressing PDFs. The developer, who had recently completed the freeCodeCamp Python certification, used Python's package manager, uv, to manage dependencies and create virtual environments.
This approach eliminated the need for manual lockfile generation and virtual environment setup, making the development process smoother. The CLI structure follows a simple organization, with commands, utilities, and tests in their respective folders. The developer utilized Python's standard library, argparse, for argument parsing and OpenPyXL for Excel conversions.
For image processing, Pillow was used, while PyMuPDF and Pillow were combined for PDF compression. The rasterization technique is employed when normal compression fails to reduce the file size significantly, as it converts the PDF to images, compresses them, and then rebuilds the PDF.
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