cli-wordle

A word guessing game implementation for command line terminals. Because everyone loves making wordle clones right now :)

I mostly made this project for practice - I'm learning Python for a new job, so I made something fun and simple to start getting used to the new language. This is the first usable thing I've ever written in Python, so don't judge me too hard, please.

How to play

Just open this directory in your terminal and run ./cli_wordle.py. The basic rules are the same as in most of the other countless wordle clones out there:

Guess the secret word by typing in any word and using the hints for your next guess.

• If a letter is not in the secret word, it will be marked in gray
• If a letter is in the right place, it will be marked in green 🟩
• If a letter is in the secret word, but in a different place, it will be marked in yellow 🟨

Use the --help or -h flag to get more info about all the optional command line arguments:

$ ./cli_wordle.py -h

usage: cli_wordle.py [-h] [-a] [-r] [-l LANGUAGE] [-n LENGTH] [-u URL] [-s]

A word guessing game for command line terminals.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -a, --all-languages   show a list of all available languages and exit
  -r, --rules           show a description of the game's rules and exit
  -l LANGUAGE, --language LANGUAGE
                        set the language of words to guess
  -n LENGTH, --length LENGTH
                        set the length of words to guess
  -u URL, --url URL     set the URL to download a word list from
  -s, --save            remember settings for future uses

System Requirements

I'm only testing this on Linux. It should also work on macOS (thanks to Lena for testing).

On Windows, it might work if your system is newer than 2016 and if you start the game from the cmd.exe terminal. If you tried it, let me know how it went :)

Obviously, you need to have Python 3 installed.

In addition to the files in this repo, the game needs a word list to choose words from. I didn't include word lists directly in here to keep them from bloating the size of this repo, but the game will automatically download a word list when you run it for the first time. This will use between 3 and 30 MB per language.

(Optional:) Run the game in Docker

To be independent of your local python environment, you can also run the game in a docker container. To do so, open this directory in a terminal and enter the following two commands:

docker build -t cli-wordle .
docker run -it cli-wordle

Word length and language

The default word length is 5 letters and the default language is English.

To change one or both of these, start the game with --language and --length arguments. If you want the game to remember your choice for later, use the --save flag.

You can also manually edit the config.txt file.

Currently, sources are included for the following languages:

• English
• French
• German
• Spanish
• Toki Pona

You can view a list of all available languages with the flag --all-languages.

If you want to use any other language, add the name of the language and the url of a word list (utf8-encoded .txt file) to the list of sources at the end of config.txt. You can either do this by manually editing the file, or by using the --language, --url and --save arguments.

Feel free to let me know where to find a good word list for any language you like, so I can include it for everyone.

If your word list is not available online, you can also manually put it in a file named words_<language>.txt and change the language value in config.txt without adding a line to the source list.