Scitacean#
Scitacean is a high-level Python package for downloading and uploading datasets from and to SciCat.
To get started, read the User Guide.
Why Scitacean?#
Scitacean abstracts away the SciCat REST API and makes it usable via a small number of Python functions. However, it is not the only package that does so. In particular Pyscicat has a similar but lower-level abstraction. Compared to Pyscicat, Scitacean offers:
An easier to use and harder to misuse interface.
Combined handling of metadata and files.
Automated handling of a number of fields and some database details like data blocks.
Basic validation of metadata.
File upload and download utilities.
While Scitacean provides access to a lower level interface similar to Pyscicat, it only supports a small subset of the SciCat API. Consider using Pyscicat if you need to access data that is not exposed through Scitacean.
Installation#
Scitacean is available on pypi.org:
python -m pip install scitacean
If you need to transfer files via SFTP, i.e., with scitacean.transfer.sftp.SFTPFileTransfer, specify the sftp extra when installing:
python -m pip install "scitacean[sftp]"
Scitacean in available on conda-forge:
conda install -c conda-forge scitacean
In contrast to installing with Pip, this always installs the dependencies for SFTP.
So no additional steps are needed to use scitacean.transfer.sftp.SFTPFileTransfer.