Quickstart / Installation¶
The BigchainDB Python Driver depends on:
libffi/ffi.h
- Python 3.5+
- A recent Python 3 version of
pip
- 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')