PYBOSSA command line client
pbs is a very simple command line interface to a PYBOSSA server. It allows
you to create projects, add tasks (from a CSV, JSON, PO or a PROPERTIES file) with a nice
progress bar, delete them and update the project templates
(tutorial, task_presenter, and descriptions) all from the command line.
PYBOSSA server >= 2.3.7.
pbs is available in Pypi, so you can install the software with pip:
pip install pybossa-pbs
If you have all the dependencies, the package will be installed and you will be
able to use it from the command line. The command is: pbs.
If you want to hack on the code, just install it but with the —editable
flag after cloning the repository:
git clone https://github.com/Scifabric/pbs.gitcd pbsvirtualenv envsource env/bin/activatepip install --editable .
This will install the pbs package, and you’ll be able to modify it, patch it,
etc. If you improve it, please, let us know and share the code so we can
integrate it back ;-)
pbs is very handy when you work with one or two PYBOSSA servers. The best way
to configure it is creating a simple config file in your home folder:
cd ~vim .pybossa.cfg
The file should have the following structure:
[default]server: http://theserver.comapikey: yourkey
If you are working with more servers, add another section below it. For
example:
[default]server: http://theserver.comapikey: yourkey[crowdcrafting]server: http://crowdcrafting.orgapikey: yourkeyincrowdcrafting
By default pbs will use the credentials of the section default, so you don’t
have to type anything to use those values. However, if you want to do actions
in the other server all you have to do is the following:
pbs --credentials crowdcrafting --help
That command will use the values of the crowdcrafting section.
PYBOSSA by default returns first your projects, meaning that if you want to work
on a project that you don’t own, it will return an error as the project will not be
found. For solving this issue you have two options:
Creating a project is very simple. All you have to do is create a file named
project.json with the following fields:
{"name": "Flickr Person Finder","short_name": "flickrperson","description": "Image pattern recognition","question": "Do you see a real human face in this photo?"}
If you use the name project.json you will not have to pass the file name
via an argument, as it’s the named used by default. Once you have the file
created, run the following command:
pbs create_project
That command should create the project. If you want to see all the available
options, please check the —help command:
pbs create_project --help
Adding tasks is very simple. You can have your tasks in three formats:
Therefore, adding tasks to your project is as simple as this command:
pbs add_tasks --tasks-file tasks_file.json
If you want to see all the available
options, please check the —help command:
NOTE: By default PYBOSSA servers use a rate limit for avoiding abuse of the
API. For this reason, you can only do usually 300 requests per every 15
minutes. If you are going to add more than 300 tasks, pbs will detect it and
warn you, auto-enabling the throttling for you to respect the limits.
pbs add_tasks --help
Now that you have added tasks, you can work in your templates. All you have to
do to add/update the templates to your project is running the following
command:
pbs update_project
That command needs to have in the same folder where you are running it, the
following files:
If you want to use another template, you can via arguments:
pbs update_project --template /tmp/template.html
If you want to see all the available
options, please check the —help command:
pbs update_project --help
Since pbs >= 2.3.0, pbs will check for an external JavaScript file named bundle.js
or bundle.min.js. If any of those files exist, then, they will be added at the bottom
of your template (like you have been doing so far with your projects).
This solution allows you to use for example webpack plus babel to transpile your code,
minimize it and add it to your PYBOSSA project.
In order to use this solution, just transpile to a file named bundle.js or bundle.min.js.
NOTE If there’s a minified version of the file, bundle.min.js, that file will be always used
instead of bundle.js.
At some point you will end up running lots of pbs update_project commands, as
you will be using your own editor for fixing CSS, HTML or JavaScript. For these
scenarios, pbs comes with a handy feature: —watch. This argument will tell pbs
to run update_project automatically when template.html, tutorial.html or
long_description.md are modified in the file system. As simple as that.
You can run it like this:
pbs update_project --watch
And the output will be similar to this:
NOTE: this also works with bundle.js files 
Thus, you can have webpack
transpiling automatically your code, and pbs will update automatically your project
with the new code.
If you need it, you can update the redundancy of a task using its ID or all the
tasks skipping the ID. For example, to update the redundancy of one task to 5:
pbs update-task-redundancy --task-id 34234 --redundancy 5
To update all of them:
pbs update-task-redundancy --redundancy 5
Note: without the —redundancy argument it will revert the redundancy to
the default value: 30.
This last command will confirm that you want to update all the tasks.
If you want to see all the available
options, please check the —help command:
pbs update-task-redundancy --help
If you need it, you can delete all the tasks from your project, or only one
using its task.id. For deleting all the tasks, all you’ve to do is run the
following command:
pbs delete_tasks
This command will confirm that you want to delete all the tasks and associated
task_runs.
If you want to see all the available
options, please check the —help command:
pbs delete_tasks --help
Adding helping materials is very simple. You can have your materials in three formats:
Therefore, adding helping materials to your project is as simple as this command:
pbs add_helpingmaterials--helping-materials-lfile file.xlsx --helping-type xlsx
If you want to see all the available
options, please check the —help command:
NOTE: By default PYBOSSA servers use a rate limit for avoiding abuse of the
API. For this reason, you can only do usually 300 requests per every 15
minutes. If you are going to add more than 300 tasks, pbs will detect it and
warn you, auto-enabling the throttling for you to respect the limits.
NOTE: PYBOSSA helping materials allows you to upload media files like videos,
images, or sounds to support your project tutorials. The command line pbs will check
for a column in your file with the name file_path so it can upload it first into
the server. Please, be sure that the file (or files) path is reachable from the
helping materials file.
pbs add_helpingmaterials --help
To run the test suite for pbs, first install note:
apt-get install python-nose
To run all tests, execute the following from the pbs project directory:
nosetests test
You have more documentation, with real examples at
http://docs.pybossa.com.
Check the tutorial as
it uses pbs, and also its pbs section
in the site.
Copyright (C) 2017 Scifabric LTD.
License: see LICENSE file.