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Installation and usage

Installation

Fractal Client is hosted on the PyPI index, and it can be installed with pip via 

pip install fractal-client

Usage

You may invoke the Fractal Client via the custom command fractal, from the command line (see its documentation here).

You must set the FRACTAL_SERVER variable, which is a fully qualified URL to the Fractal server installation (e.g. http://localhost:8000). This can be an environment variable or it can be stored in a an environment file .fractal.env as in 

FRACTAL_SERVER=http://localhost:8010

Credentials

Most fractal commands are restricted to authenticated users, and user credentials can be specified in multiple ways:

  • Set FRACTAL_USER and FRACTAL_PASSWORD variables as environment variables;
  • Add FRACTAL_USER and FRACTAL_PASSWORD variables in .fractal.env;
  • Explicitly provide --user and --password arguments for fractal commands, see here.

Cache

By default, fractal caches some information (namely a valid token for the current session on fractal-server and a list of tasks) in ~/.cache/fractal. This destination can be customized by setting the FRACTAL_CACHE_PATH variables.

Full example

Here is an example of a valid .fractal.env file: 

FRACTAL_USER=user@something.com
FRACTAL_PASSWORD=myuser
FRACTAL_SERVER=http://localhost:8010
FRACTAL_CACHE_PATH=/some/path/fractal-cache