Poe the Poet

A batteries included task runner that works well with poetry or uv.

📖 Read the documentation 📖

Features

• ✅ Straight forward declaration of project tasks in your pyproject.toml (or poe_tasks.toml)

• ✅ Tasks are run in poetry or uv’s virtualenv (or another env you specify)

• ✅ Shell completion of task names and arguments

• ✅ The poe CLI can be used standalone, or as a plugin for poetry

• ✅ Tasks can be commands, shell scripts, python expressions, or references to python functions

• ✅ Concise commands with extra arguments passed to the task poe [options] task [task_args]

• ✅ Easily declare named CLI arguments for your tasks

• ✅ Tasks can specify and reference environment variables, even without a shell

• ✅ Tasks are self documenting, with optional help messages and task grouping (just run poe with no arguments)

• ✅ Tasks can be composed to run in sequence, in parallel, or as a DAG.

• ✅ Works with .env files

• ✅ Can be used as a library to embed in other tools

• ✅ Tasks can be defined in python packages for ease of reuse across projects

• ✅ Also works fine as a general purpose task runner

• ✅ Ships with an official Agent Skill to help AI coding agents use poe effectively

Quick start

1. Install the Poe the Poet globally via pipx or another method.

pipx install poethepoet

Or add it as a poetry project plugin:

[tool.poetry.requires-plugins]
poethepoet = ">=0.49"

2. Define some tasks in your pyproject.toml

[tool.poe.tasks]
test         = "pytest --cov=my_app"                         # a simple command task
serve.script = "my_app.service:run(debug=True)"              # python script based task
tunnel.shell = "ssh -N -L 0.0.0.0:8080:$PROD:8080 $PROD &"   # (posix) shell based task

# A more complete example with documentation and named arguments
[tool.poe.tasks.count-incomplete]
help = "Count incomplete tasks in DynamoDB"
cmd  = """
aws dynamodb scan --table-name tasks
                  --select "COUNT"
                  --filter-expression "status >= :status"
                  --expression-attribute-values '{":status":{"S":"incomplete"}}'
                  --no-cli-pager
"""
args = [
  # Allow $AWS_REGION to be overridden with a CLI option when calling the task
  {name = "AWS_REGION", options = ["--region", "-r"], default = "${AWS_REGION}"}
]

3. Run your tasks via the CLI

$ poe test -v tests/unit # extra CLI arguments are appended to the underlying command
Poe => pytest --cov=my_app
...

If you’re using poetry or uv, then poe will automatically use CLI tools and libraries from your project’s virtualenv without you having to run poetry run / uv run

Poe can also be used as a general purpose task runner.

Contributing

There’s plenty to do, come say hi in the discussions or open an issue! 👋

Also check out the CONTRIBUTING guide 🤓

License

MIT