python-cli

Python CLI

A single file command line client: amodb_cli.py. It searches titles, shows movie and TV details, lists trending titles, and runs OMDb style and external id lookups. It uses only the Python standard library, so there is nothing to install from PyPI. Tested on Python 3.13.

amodb is a paid API. Get a key at https://amodb.dev/pricing. The same code works against any TMDB v3 compatible base URL: set AMODB_BASE_URL. The omdb command calls /omdb/ on the same host as that base URL, so it needs the amodb API.

Setup

No install step. Set the key in your shell and run the file.

export AMODB_API_KEY=your_key_here
python amodb_cli.py --help

On Windows PowerShell use $env:AMODB_API_KEY = "your_key_here".

Variable	Required	Default
AMODB_API_KEY	yes	none
AMODB_BASE_URL	no	https://api.amodb.dev/3

Commands

python amodb_cli.py search "inception"
python amodb_cli.py search "nolan" --type person
python amodb_cli.py movie 550
python amodb_cli.py tv 1399 --language ru-RU
python amodb_cli.py trending --window week
python amodb_cli.py omdb tt0137523
python amodb_cli.py find tt0137523
python amodb_cli.py search "inception" --json

Options go after the command. --type takes movie, tv, person or multi (the default) for search. --language (or -l) takes a tag such as ru-RU or pt-BR. --json prints the raw response instead of a table.

On an API error the CLI prints the status_message to stderr and exits with code 1. A 429 response is retried once after the number of seconds in Retry-After.

How the code works

• get_json(url) is the only function that touches the network. It uses urllib.request, sends the key as Authorization: Bearer, and turns every failure into an ApiError.
• retry_delay() reads Retry-After as seconds or as an HTTP date and clamps it to 0 to 60 seconds. get_json sleeps that long and tries once more on HTTP 429.
• error_message() returns the TMDB status_message (or the OMDb Error text) from the body, and falls back to the HTTP status line for non JSON bodies.
• api() and omdb() build the URL. The OMDb call sends the same key as the apikey query parameter.
• build_parser() defines the commands with argparse. Each command has a small render_* function for the table or lines, and --json bypasses it.

Tests

The tests start a local http.server stub, point AMODB_BASE_URL at it, and cover search, movie, error handling and the 429 retry. They never use the network and need no key.

python -m unittest

License

MIT