[atomic-devel] Python interface for atomic scan

[Dharmit Shah <dharmit redhat com>]

Hi,

I'm working on writing atomic scanner and would like to invoke them from
a python program. However, I couldn't find documentation about it. Also,
looking at the `Atomic/scan.py` and specifically scan function in that
file, it seems like it is designed to be used from CLI only.

At the moment, we're using Python's `subprocess` module to invoke
`atomic scan` commands and then parse its output to figure the location
where scanner would have output the file(s). Then we parse the json
files and carry out tasks like notifying a user if there's something
that needs to be worked upon based on the scan results. This doesn't
seem to be a good way to go about it since any change in the way `atomic
scan` outputs to stdout would cause things to break on our end.

It'd be helpful if we can, instead of using `subprocess` module, have
Python interface to invoke the scanner. This would make it simpler to
know where the scan results got stored and directly access them. Also,
is it possible to tell atomic scanner to use a specific file to output
the results? I checked `atomic scan --help` but couldn't find one.

Thanks,
Dharmit.