Get set up with a Python interpreter so that you can begin to automate many administrative tasks. There are many other possible choices of languages for automation of these ThingPark and IoT administration tasks, and many of the tips given here will be equally applicable to these other languages.

Install Python

Python is a cross-platform scripting language and is available for many different platforms. Mac and Windows download-links are given below:

• Python for Windows
• Python for Mac OSX

and GNU/Linux systems will probably have at least one version of Python installed already. There are many resources available to help you with correctly installing and setting-up Python, so that information will not be presented here. The primary purpose of this page is to provide links and just enough information to give an overview of what you will likely need to know, or refresh one’s memory, for automating ThingPark DX API tasks using Python scripts.

PIP for Managing Python Packages

PIP (“Pip Installs Packages”) is the default Python package manager (from Python version 3.4 onwards) and it is a convenient utility for installing additional Python packages, and managing Python project dependencies. Installing new Python packages simply requires that you issue a command of the form:

$ pip install <package>

And to remove that package, you again use the pip (or pip3) command:

$ pip uninstall <package>

where <package> is a placeholder to represent the name of a particular package (and the actual package name will not contain angle-brackets); e.g., you may want to (un)install the virtualenv utility to manage Python virtual environments – and this is simply one of the following commands:

$ pip install virtualenv
$ pip uninstall virtualenv

Virtual Environments

Virtual environments ensure that dependencies can be installed without conflicting with, or breaking, other installed packages. There is a lot of excellent guides available for this, including:

• Pipenv & Virtual Environments

The following subsection gives a quick overview of how to setup and use virtualenv – which may be of more use if one has used similar tools before, or if it has simply been a while.

Setting up Virual Environments

Install a suitable version of Python (for example v2.7 or v3.6.2), along with pip (or, pip3), to install Python packages, and then:

$ pip install virtualenv
$ cd scripts
$ virtualenv venv

where venv is where you would like to store the Python virtual environment modules.

export PATH=/home/<user>/.local/bin:${PATH}

The general “flow” to use these scripts would be:

$ source venv/bin/activate
(venv) $ <do scripts stuff>
(venv) $ deactivate
$

While inside your virtual environment, the Python interpreter and packages of that environment will be visible and active. The deactivate command reverts your Python environment back to the system defaults.

$ dropbox exclude add venv
Excluded: 
venv

Managing Project Dependencies

Existing Python projects/repositories often include a requirements.txt file, which lists the packages/dependencies for the current project. These packages can be installed by simply issuing the command:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

This will fetch all of the specified packages, and with versions that match those of the requirements.txt file. You can create your own list of dependencies for your scripts by using the following command:

$ pip freeze > requirements.txt

venv/

Next Steps

We are in the process of documenting some examples of TPW tasks that we hope some subscribers will find useful. Please contact us if you feel that there is a DX API example task that should be useful to other TPW users.