docassemblecli

docassemblecli provides command-line utilities for interacting with docassemble servers. This package is meant to be installed on your local machine, not on a docassemble server.

Prerequisites

You need to have Python installed on your computer.

Installation

To install docassemblecli from PyPI, run:

pip install docassemblecli

Usage

Currently, docassemblecli provides one command-line utility called dainstall, which installs a Python package on a remote server using files on your local computer.

For example, suppose that you wrote a docassemble extension package called docassemble.foobar using the docassemble Playground. In the Playground, you can download the package as a ZIP file called docassemble-foobar.zip. You can then unpack this ZIP file and see a folder called docassemble-foobar. Inside of this folder there is a folder called docassemble and a setup.py file.

From the command line, use cd to navigate to the folder that contains the docassemble-foobar folder. Then run:

dainstall docassemble-foobar

On Windows, you will need to write python -m docassemblecli.dainstall in place of dainstall, so your command will look like this:

python -m docassemblecli.dainstall docassemble-foobar

The first time you run this command, it will ask you for the URL of your docassemble server and the API key of a user with admin or developer privileges.

It will look something like this:

$ dainstall docassemble-foobar
Base URL of your docassemble server (e.g., https://da.example.com): https://dev.example.com
API key of admin user on http://localhost: H3PWMKJOIVAXL4PWUJH3HG7EKPFU5GYT
Saved base URL and API key to .docassemblecli
Waiting for package to install.............................
Installed.

The next time you run dainstall, it will not ask you for the URL and API key.

You can run dainstall --help to get more information about how dainstall works:

$ dainstall --help
usage: dainstall [-h] [--apiurl APIURL] [--apikey APIKEY] [--norestart]
                 [--noconfig]
                 directory

positional arguments:
  directory

optional arguments:
  -h, --help       show this help message and exit
  --apiurl APIURL  base url of your docassemble server, e.g.
                   https://da.example.com
  --apikey APIKEY  docassemble API key
  --norestart      do not restart the docassemble server after installing
                   package (only applicable in single-server environments)
  --noconfig       do not use the .docassemblecli config file

For example, you might want to pass the URL and API key in the command itself:

dainstall --apiurl https://dev.example.com --apikey H3PWMKJOIVAXL4PWUJH3HG7EKPFU5GYT docassemble-foobar

The --norestart option can be used when your docassemble installation only uses one server (which is typical) and you are not modifying .py files. In this case, it is not necessary for the Python web application to restart after the package has been installed. This will cause dainstall to return a few seconds faster than otherwise.

How it works

The dainstall command is just a simple Python script that creates a ZIP file and uploads it through the docassemble API. Feel free to copy the code and write your own scripts to save yourself time.