Launching a Textual application with App().run() while enabling the dev tools

[dolfandringa]

I am using Typer in my software project for many reasons, most of them with commands not involving Textual. I also have a tool built with Textual. I would like to launch that tool also from a Typer command (with more typer specific logic in there too), with StopwatchApp().run(). But this does not connect the app to the textual console nor does it enable the devtools. Is there any way to launch a Textual app from python code, rather than using the textual commandline, and still have it use the devtools or at least the Textual console for logging?

Here is a MRE:

from pathlib import Path
from typing import Annotated, Any

import typer
from textual.app import App, ComposeResult
from textual.containers import HorizontalGroup, VerticalScroll
from textual.widgets import Button, Footer, Header

app = typer.Typer()


class Stopwatch(HorizontalGroup):
    """A stopwatch widget."""

    def compose(self) -> ComposeResult:
        """Create child widgets of a stopwatch."""
        yield Button("Start", id="start", variant="success")
        yield Button("Stop", id="stop", variant="error")


class StopwatchApp(App):
    """A Textual app to manage stopwatches."""

    BINDINGS = [("d", "toggle_dark", "Toggle dark mode")]

    def __init__(self, num_iterations: int, save_file: Path, *args: Any, **kwargs: Any):
        super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        self.num_iterations = num_iterations
        self.save_file = save_file

    def compose(self) -> ComposeResult:
        """Create child widgets for the app."""
        yield Header()
        yield Footer()
        yield VerticalScroll(Stopwatch())

    def action_toggle_dark(self) -> None:
        """An action to toggle dark mode."""
        self.theme = (
            "textual-dark" if self.theme == "textual-light" else "textual-light"
        )


@app.command()
def stopwatch(
    num_iterations: Annotated[
        int, typer.Option(help="The number of iterations to run for.")
    ],
    save_file: Annotated[
        Path,
        typer.Option(
            file_okay=True,
            dir_okay=False,
            writable=True,
            help="Location to save the results to.",
        ),
    ],
):
    StopwatchApp(num_iterations=num_iterations, save_file=save_file).run()

[TomJGooding]

Could you use the -c switch to run the command that launches the Textual app?

For example something like textual run --dev -c typer main.py run?

[dolfandringa]

I guess that would be a possible workaround. I can check if that works. But allowing the Textual Console and devtools to work through a direct python api call rather than force the user to use the textual cli would be more desirable. We also don't use the typer command directly in the cli but rather use pyproject.toml script definitions that pick up the typer app automatically. So it gets pretty convoluted with long double cli commands stacked on top of each other pretty quickly.

[dolfandringa]

I would become poetry run textual run -dev -c typer mypackage/management/my_command.py mycommand
rather than the current poetry run mycommand -dev