python argparse with dependencies

Question

I\'m writing a script which has 2 arguments which are mutually exclusive, and an option that only makes sense with one of those arguments. I\'m trying to set up argparse to fail

Answer 1

Add the usage argument when creating the parser:

usage = "usage: whichboom [-h] [-s | [-h] [-s]] host"
description = "Lookup servers by ip address from host file"
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description=description, usage=usage)

Source: http://docs.python.org/dev/library/argparse.html#usage

Answer 2

You just have the argument groups mixed up. In your code, you only assign one option to the mutually exclusive group. I think what you want is:

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='Lookup servers by ip address from host file')
parser.add_argument('host', nargs=1,
            help="ip address to lookup")
main_group = parser.add_mutually_exclusive_group()
mysql_group = main_group.add_argument_group()
main_group.add_argument("-s", "--ssh", dest='ssh', action='store_true',
            default=False,
            help='Connect to this machine via ssh, instead of printing hostname')
mysql_group.add_argument("-m", "--mysql", dest='mysql', action='store_true',
            default=False,
            help='Start a mysql tunnel to the host, instead of printing hostname')
main_group.add_argument("-f", "--firefox", dest='firefox', action='store_true',
            default=False,
            help='Start a firefox session to the remotemyadmin instance')

You could just skip the whole mutually exclusive group thing and add something like this:

usage = 'whichboom [-h] [-s | [-h] [-s]] host'
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description, usage)
options, args = parser.parse_args()
if options.ssh and options.firefox:
    parser.print_help()
    sys.exit()