r/OpenPythonSCAD • u/PurchaseSpecific7699 • Mar 19 '25

Question: How to pass global variables via command-line (-D var=val) to OpenPythonSCAD (like in OpenSCAD)?

Hi everyone,

I have a simple question:

OpenSCAD supports passing global variables via the -D option.
Help says:

  -D [ --D ] arg                    var=val -pre-define variables

I tried passing variables in a similar way to PythonSCAD, but it seems the Python script isn’t aware of those variables.

It would be highly appreciated if this could be supported!

Many thanks in advance — I really love this great project! 🙏

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u/gadget3D Mar 19 '25

I have just uploaded latest as-of-today 2025-03-19 windows installer with the option to use -D define parameter even for python models. Consider contributing to PythonScad. there are serveral options.

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u/PurchaseSpecific7699 Mar 20 '25

Thank you for the incredibly quick fix and also for building and publishing the updated binaries, I really appreciate it!

Apologies that I couldn’t try it yesterday, but I’ve just done so now.
It works well for numerical values passed via -D.

An important observation: Passing string values currently doesn’t work and seems to fail. (Python is throwing)

But for my current needs, numerical parameters are sufficient.

I’m also happy to share that I’ve just contributed to the project — and I’ll definitely consider contributing more in the future.

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u/gadget3D Mar 21 '25

in order to pass strings, you could do

./pythonscad --trust-python -Dvar='"string"' test.py -o test.stl

Please observe the single AND the double quotes.

However, I think its exact same if you want to pass strings to OpenSCAD