Pycopia reference documentation¶
Pycopia is a collection of useful modules for developing Python applications. It’s primary focus is on applications for network management, software QA and other kinds of testing, and web applications.
Pycopia is divided into a collection of sub-packages containing modules in various broad categories. You don’t need to install all of them if you don’t need them.
However, some packages depend on others, but the packages are arranged in dependecy order, as follows.
- aid
- utils
- core
- CLI
- debugger
- process
- SMI
- mibs
- SNMP
- storage
- net
- audio
- XML
- WWW
- QA
IF you only want the pycopia.CLI toolkit modules, for example, you only need to install pycopia-aid, pycopia-utils, pycopia-core and finally pycopia-CLI.
It strives to provide Pythonic interfaces for various functionality. You may find similar modules elsewhere, often ported from Perl or Java, that just don’t have that elegance that a good Python module has. This may take some getting used to for people not having a good familiarity with the Python language.
Functionality¶
Some examples of core functionality include:
- SNMP
- An implementation of SNMP v1 and v2c protocol and manager objects. With this you can write readable SNMP code that interacts with SNMP enabled devices using object names. For example, scalars map to Python attributes on the manager object,
- SMI
- A library, based on wrapping libsmi, for parsing and accessing MIB files.
- POM
- Python Object Model for XML. This is patterned after XML DOM, but is more pythonic. It also incorporates some XPath funcionality. You can parse and generate XML documents.
- XHTML
- Utilities and classes for creating XHTML documents. This is based on the Pythonic Object Model (POM) module, also found here. These documents can be streamed to a socket, useful for dynamic web content.
- WWW.framework
- A web application framework supporting virtual domains, security features, AJAJ (asynchronous calls from Javascript to Python with JSON serialization), and pure-Python markup generation (no templating language).
- process
- Spawn supprocesses. Interact with them using the Expect object. Get process stats. Manage a collection of subprocesses with optional restart on failure.
- CLI
- Toolkit for making interactive command tools fast and easy.
- debugger
- Enhanced Python debugger. More commands and colored output. Spawn your editor in the right spot.
- QA
- Test harness and framework for running tests, managing tests, and recording results. Its focus is on the whole gamut of the testing process, from device interaction to test case management to result analysis and reporting.
- storage
- A database for keeping persistent configuration, the equipment object model, test cases and test results. Used by the network management and QA framework tools.
- enhancements
- The pycopia-aid package includes various modules that imporove on the standard modules found in the standard library.
Operating System support¶
Pycopia is developed on, runs on, and targeted for the Linux operating system. Some modules leverage Linux specific features. While many modules will work on other operating systems, this set of modules is only guaranteed to work in Linux.
Download¶
There are no releases to download. You can get the latest code using subversion client. The code is currently hosted at Google code hosting.
Run the following:
mkdir ~/src
cd ~/src
svn checkout http://pycopia.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ pycopia
That will get you the lastest code from trunk.
Documentation contents¶
- Pycopia Installation
- Pycopia Python aid package
- Pycopia utils package
- Pycopia core package
- Pycopia CLI toolkit
- Pycopia enhanced debugger package
- Pycopia Process package
- Pycopia SMI package
- Pycopia mibs package
- Pycopia SNMP package
- Pycopia storage package
- Pycopia net package
- Pycopia audio package
- Pycopia XML package
- Pycopia WWW package
- Pycopia QA package
- Pycopia vim package
