eggplants/deepl-cli

deepl‑cli – Command‑line wrapper for DeepL Translator

What it is – A tiny Python package that lets you call the DeepL web translator from the terminal (or from Python code) without needing a paid DeepL API key. It drives the DeepL website with Playwright, extracts the translation, and prints it back to you.

Why it matters – Translation is a common downstream task for many AI‑powered workflows (e.g., localising documentation, preprocessing multilingual corpora, or building quick‑look‑up tools). Having a zero‑setup CLI means you can script translations in shells or CI pipelines without registering for an API.

How to get it – Install from PyPI:

pip install deepl-cli

The package pulls in playwright and will automatically download the required browser binaries on first run.

Typical command‑line usage

# Translate a short string from English to Japanese
$ deepl -F en -T ja -s <<< 'This tool is useful for me.'
このツールは私にとって役に立ちます。

# Read from a file and translate
$ deepl -f mytext.txt -F en -T fr

Key flags:

• -F / --fr – source language (or auto to let DeepL detect).
• -T / --to – target language (many ISO‑style codes are supported).
• -s – read the source text from stdin.
• -f – translate the contents of a file.
• --no-headless – show the browser window (useful for debugging).
• -t – timeout in milliseconds.

Python API – If you prefer to embed translation in a script:

from deepl import DeepLCLI

translator = DeepLCLI('en', 'ja')
print(translator.translate('hello'))   # → こんにちは

An async variant (translate_async) is also provided for asyncio code (see examples/async.py).

Limitations – Because it scrapes the public DeepL site, it is subject to the same rate‑limits and usage policies as a human user. For heavy‑duty or commercial workloads you should switch to the official DeepL API (the README points to deepl-python).

License – MIT, so you can freely modify or embed it in other tools.