njr0 / fdb.py

FDB PYTHON LIBRARY
==================

fdb is a primarily a library for providing access to the FluidDB database
(http://fluidinfo.com/fluiddb) from Fluidinfo (http://fluidinfo.com/.)
There is lots of coverage of the library (and its evolution) at
http://abouttag.blogspot.com/.


FDB COMMAND LINE ACCESS
=======================

fdb can also be used for command-line access to FluidDB.
See 'USING THE COMMAND LINE', below.


DEPENDENCIES
============

If you're running python 2.6, fdb.py should just run.   With earlier
version of python, you need to get access to simplejson and httplib2.
You can get simplejson from http://pypi.python.org/pypi/simplejson/
and httplib2 from http://code.google.com/p/httplib2/.


CREDENTIALS
===========

For many operations, you also need an account on FluidDB,
and credentials (a username and password).   You can get these from
    http://fluidinfo.com/accounts/new
The library allows you to give it your credentials in various
different ways, but life is simplest if you stick them in
a 2-line file (preferably with restricted read access) in the format

username
password

On Unix, the default location for this is ~/.fluidDBcredentials,
and on Windows the default file is fluidDBcredentials.ini in your
home folder.


TESTS
=====

The library includes a set of tests.   If you have valid credentials,
and everything is OK, these should run successfully if you just execute
the file fdb.py.   For example, at the time of writing this README file
(version 0.8 of the fdb), I get this:

$ python fdb.py
....................
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 20 tests in 46.311s

OK


USING THE LIBRARY
=================

Four ways of exploring the library are:
  1. look at the tests (the ones in the class TestFluidDB)
  2. look at the blog (http://abouttag.blogspot.com)
  3. read the function documentation, which is...existent.
  4. look at and run example.py, which should print DADGAD and 10.


USING THE COMMAND LINE
======================

Commands can be run by giving arguments to fdb.py.
For a list of commands, use

  python fdb.py help

An example command is

python fdb.py show -a DADGAD rating /fluiddb/about

Obviously, if you want to use fdb as a command from the shell, it will
probably be convenient to use an alias or create a trivial shell script
to run it.   I use bash, with the alias

alias fdb='python ~/python/fluiddb/fdb.py'

which allows me to type

fdb show -a DADGAD rating /fluiddb/about

etc.


DELICIOUS
=========

Also distributed with fdb itself is code for accessing delicious.com
(http://del.icio.us/, as was), and for migrating bookmarks and other
data to FluidDB.   This also includes functionality for creating web
homepages from delicious based on a home tag.   See the README-DELICIOUS
file for details on this functionality.