bptt (British Public Transport in the Terminal) is a simple command line application that displays information about various public transport services. Currently the focus is on London / the UK, and the main suppored services are Transport for London (TfL) and National Rail.

It is divided into commands and sub-commands. The currently supported top-level commands are:

The tfl commands generally take line, mode, stop or bike station IDs in the form used by the TfL API. Some examples of what these ID look like:

• Mode: tube, bus, river-bus, etc. Use bptt tfl search mode to see all modes supported by the TfL API (but note that some modes, such as walking, won't work with commands like modestatus).
• Line: northern, waterloo-city, sl4, suffragette, etc. Use tfl search line <mode-id> to see all line IDs for the given mode.
• Stop: These are NaPTAN IDs, eg, 490011218B. There are a few ways to access these:
  • You can download a full list from the above link.
  • You can view the stop on OpenStreetMap and look for the naptan:AtcoCode tag.
  • You can try bptt tfl search stop <search string>. However, note that often that command (like the API endpoint it calls) will only return the NaPTAN ID for a "hub", which is a collection of stops. Hubs themselves (as opposed to the stops) will not yield any arrivals data, and the stops won't always be returned in the data.
• Bike point: These are of the form BikePoints_<n>, where <n> is an integer, eg, BikePoints_427. Use bptt search bike <search string> to search for relevant bike point IDs.

The nre departures command takes the CRS code (which must be uppercase) of the relevant rail station, eg, KGX for King's Cross. There isn't currently a way to search for CRS codes from within bptt but you can look them up at http://www.railwaycodes.org.uk/crs/crs0.shtm.

For convenience you can set aliases for stop IDs, bike point IDs and CRS codes in the configuration file.

bptt is just a simple interface to a number of APIs. These APIs generally take API keys. For the TfL API, a key is optional but recommended. Currently the API will serve requests without an API key, but there is no guarantee this will continue or you won't get rate limited. The other APIs require API keys. You can get these at:

• Transport for London: https://api-portal.tfl.gov.uk/
• National Rail Enquiries: https://raildata.org.uk
• Air Quality Index: https://aqicn.org/data-platform/token/

The relevant API key can be passed using the --api-key flag or can be specified in the config file.

bptt does not perform any caching of data so it is up to the user to ensure it is used in compliance with the applicable API terms.

The behaviour of bptt can be configured by command line flags or though a TOML-based configuration file. You can always call bptt or its sub-commands with -h to view a list of supported flags.

You can point bptt to a specific config file location by passing the --config flag. Otherwise, it will use the ConfigDir library to determine the "normal" place to look for a config file (for example, on Linux it will look for $HOME/.config/bptt/config.toml).

The repo contains a documented example config.toml file.

bptt will output the desired data in a table format. Spaces are used for padding and tabs to separate columns, so it works best in a terminal environment using a monospace font.

Passing the --header flag will include a header row in the output with a short name for each column. Passing the --timestamp flag will include a "Last updated" timestamp at the bottom of the output.

Passing the --color flag will use color in the output, where appropriate. For example, bad news (disrupted status, late services, etc) may be displayed in yellow or red, whereas good news may be displayed in green. This uses ANSI escape codes to format the output, so again, it works best in a terminal that supports such escape codes.

Passing --rows with an integer fixes the number of rows in the output. If there is more data than will fit on that number of rows, the rest of the data will not be displayed. Conversely, if there is less data than will fill that number of rows, the output will be padded with blank lines. If --header or --timestamp are included, these will be counted in the number of rows, and the timestamp will always be displayed on the last line of the output (after any padding blank lines).

The --col-size flag allows you to fix the size of each column in the output. It should be a comma-separated list of integers. Each integer is the width in terminal characters of the corresponding column. If the text to be displayed in a column is longer than the desired width, it will be cut off, as indicated by a "…" character. A value of 0 for a column hides that column completely.

Any negative value means there is no fixed width for that column (the width of the column will be the length of the longest piece of text in that column, which is also the behaviour if the --col-size flag is not set). Similarly, if fewer integers are passed via the --col-size than there are columns in the output, any extra columns in the output will be treated as unfixed.

Technically, column widths can also be set in config.toml using the column_size setting, but this can only be set globally (rather than per-command) so it is not really recommended to do it this way unless you will only ever be calling the same command (as different commands will output different numbers of columns).

Remember that tabs are used to separate columns, so column n won't always start one character after the end of column n-1.

wtfutil is a dashboard for the terminal. bptt is in no way affiliated with wtfutil (nor am I), but a large part of the reason I wrote bptt was to be able to present public transport information in a dashboard format, so the file examples/wtfutil/config.yml in this repo is an example config file for wtfutil that will display various bits of information about public transport around Charing Cross in London, assuming that you have a bptt config file with the relevant API keys included. The file at examples/wtfutil/screenshot.jpg shows you what the output will look like.

$ bptt tfl modestatus tube
Bakerloo          	Good Service
Central           	Good Service
Circle            	Good Service
District          	Good Service
Hammersmith & City	Minor Delays
Jubilee           	Good Service
Metropolitan      	Good Service
Northern          	Good Service
Piccadilly        	Good Service
Victoria          	Good Service
Waterloo & City   	Good Service

$ bptt --header tfl status 470 rb1 london-cable-car
Line               	Status      
470                	Good Service
IFS Cloud Cable Car	Good Service
RB1                	Good Service

$ bptt tfl search bike southwark --header
Name                          	ID            	Latitude 	Longitude
Webber Street , Southwark     	BikePoints_80 	51.500693	-0.102091
Colombo Street, Southwark     	BikePoints_240	51.505459	-0.105692
Southwark Station 2, Southwark	BikePoints_421	51.504044	-0.104778
Blackfriars Road, Southwark   	BikePoints_792	51.505461	-0.104540
Southwark Street, Bankside    	BikePoints_803	51.505409	-0.098341

$ bptt --header tfl bikes BikePoints_240
Station                  	Bikes	E-Bikes	Empty docks
Colombo Street, Southwark	7    	1      	6          

$ bptt tfl arrivals 490008275H --col-size -1,9,-1
17      Archway         34s   
46      Paddingt…       4m36s 
17      Archway         14m54s
46      Paddingt…       19m44s
17      Archway         30m6s 

$ bptt waqi London --header
AQI	Description
9  	Good