ninoc / datalab-client

Data Lab Client Commands and Interfaces

DOCUMENTATION

datalab is command-line Python client for the NOAO DataLab.

It provides easy access to DataLab functionalities:

1. remote storage (VOSpace)
2. (a)synchronous data queries (TAP)
3. job management

Authentication to DataLab is based on a username and password.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

• A Data Lab account
• Python 2.7 or later
• fuse or OSX-FUSE (if you want to mount the remote storage as a local filesystem)

INSTALLATION

You can retrieve the gitlab distribution and install via:

git clone http://github.com/noao-datalab/datalab-client.git
cd datalab-client
python setup.py install

If you want it installed in your private Python repository (because you maintain mutiple Python instances on your machine) then do:

python setup.py install --user

Finally, if you intend to mount the virtual storage as a local filesystem, you will need to touch a file in your home directory:

touch ~/.netrc

TUTORIAL

Documentation for all the datalab commands can be found here. Examples of using the datalab command for working with the virtual storage and querying can be found in the following Jupyter notebooks:

• A Jupyter notebook for using the Storage Manager API
• A Jupyer notebook for using the Query Manager API

The datalab command will prompt you for required arguments if you do not provide them on the command line, e.g.:

datalab login
user (default: None):
password (default: None):

You can also always get summaries of the arguments with the help option:

datalab login help
The 'login' task takes the following parameters:
  debug - print debug log level messages [optional]
  verbose - print verbose level log messages [optional]
  warning - print warning level log messages [optional]
  user - username of account in DataLab [required]
  password - password for account in DataLab [required]
  mount - mountpoint of remove VOSpace [optional]

To mount virtual storage as a local directory at login

You can mount the virtual storage as a local directory at login by using the optional mount argument.

datalab login --user=<user> --password=<password> --mount=/tmp/vospace

This will attempt to mount the default virtual storage (at NOAO). If you need to mount another one, you should use the datalab mount option.

To mount virtual storage as a local directory once logged in

datalab mount
vospace (default: vos:):
mount (default: /tmp/vospace):

To unmount virtual storage

You can either use a regular Unix command:

umount /tmp/vospace

or unmount the space when you log out of Data Lab:

datalab logout --unmount=/tmp/vospace