Quick Start

Making a request to a Polytope service is made simple by using polytope-client. The following snippet is all you need to start downloading data.

# install the client
pip install polytope-client

# set your credentials
export POLYTOPE_USERNAME=polly
export POLYTOPE_PASSWORD=tope

# set the URL of the polytope-server
export POLYTOPE_ADDRESS=polytope.example.com

# see what collections are available
polytope list collections

# construct a request
cat > request.json <<EOF
{
    "year" : 2018
    "parameter" : [ "population", "GDP" ]
    "country" : [ "ALL" ]
}
EOF

# submit the request and download the data
polytope retrieve census-data request.json result.json

The credentials you use, the collections that you access and the format of the request will all depend on the configuration of the polytope-server which you speak to. The following sections explain in more detail.