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How do I pass multiple arguments with values, from command line, to a custom django management command?

def add_arguments(self, parser):
    parser.add_argument('str_arg1', nargs='+')
    parser.add_argument('int_arg2', nargs='+', type=int)

When I run:

./manage.py my_command str_arg1 value int_arg2 1 --settings=config.settings.local

I get the following values in options:

options['str_arg1'] = ['str_arg1', 'value', 'int_arg2']
options['int_arg2'] = [1]

Tried searching in documentation and online for a solution and multiple ways of passing the arguments with no luck. Django version is 1.10.

Thanks

Ovidiu
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1 Answers1

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The way you have defined the arguments means they are positional arguments. There's no sensible way to have multiple positional arguments which consume an unknown amount of values.

Modify your parser to specify them as options instead:

parser.add_argument('--str-arg1', nargs='+')
parser.add_argument('--int-arg2', nargs='+', type=int)

And modify the call:

./manage.py my_command --str-arg1 value --int-arg2 1
wim
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    Thanks a lot, that did the trick. So simple. Any idea why it would put the values into lists? I'm now retrieving them using `options['str_arg1'][0]` – Ovidiu Apr 10 '17 at 20:31
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    When you use `nargs='+'`, argparse will always store the values into list. `+` means "there may be one or more values for this argument". If you know you only want to consume exactly one value, you could omit that `nargs='+'`. – wim Apr 10 '17 at 21:22