Quickstart / Installation

The BigchainDB Python Driver depends on:

  1. libffi/ffi.h
  2. Python 3.5+
  3. A recent Python 3 version of pip
  4. A recent Python 3 version of setuptools

If you’re missing one of those, then see below. Otherwise, you can install the BigchainDB Python Driver (bigchaindb_driver) using:

pip install bigchaindb_driver

and then you can try the Basic Usage Examples.

How to Install the Dependencies

Dependency 1: ffi.h

BigchainDB (server and driver) depends on cryptoconditions, which depends on PyNaCl (Networking and Cryptography library), which depends on ffi.h. Hence, depending on your setup, you may need to install the development files for libffi.

On Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04, this works:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install libffi-dev

On Fedora 23 and 24, this works:

sudo dnf update

sudo dnf install libffi-devel

For other operating systems, just do some web searches for “ffi.h” with the name of your OS.

Dependency 2: Python 3.5+

The BigchainDB Python Driver uses Python 3.5+. You can check your version of Python using:

python --version

An easy way to install a specific version of Python, and to switch between versions of Python, is to use virtualenv. Another option is conda.

Dependency 3: pip

You also need to get a recent, Python 3 version of pip, the Python package manager.

If you’re using virtualenv or conda, then each virtual environment should include an appropriate version of pip.

You can check your version of pip using:

pip --version

pip was at version 9.0.0 as of November 2016. If you need to upgrade your version of pip, then see the pip documentation or our page about that in the BigchainDB Server docs.

Dependency 4: setuptools

Once you have a recent Python 3 version of pip, you should be able to upgrade setuptools using:

pip install --upgrade setuptools

Installing from the Source Code

The source code for the BigchainDB Python Driver can be downloaded from the Github repo. You can either clone the public repository:

git clone git://github.com/bigchaindb/bigchaindb-driver

Or download the tarball:

curl  -OL https://github.com/bigchaindb/bigchaindb-driver/tarball/master

Once you have a copy of the source code, you can install it by going to the directory containing setup.py and doing:

python setup.py install

Installing latest master with pip

In order to work with the latest BigchainDB (server) master branch:

$ pip install --process-dependency-links git+https://github.com/bigchaindb/bigchaindb-driver.git

Point to some BigchainDB node, which is running BigchainDB server master:

from bigchaindb_driver import BigchainDB

bdb = BigchainDB('http://here.be.dragons:9984')