Basic Installation
This page contains instructions for setting up only the interpreter and other command-line tools. This is a much simpler installation than setting up the web server, which is described in Web Server Installation.
Note that Python 3.7 or higher is required in all cases. If your system defaults to Python 2.x, you probably need to use pip3 instead of pip. Notable culprits here are Raspberry Pi OS and Debian. This is likely to be the problem if you get the message Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement bardolph.
Because the Bardolph wheel designates lifxlan as a dependency, it may also be downloaded and installed.
pip install bardolph
After this intallation, the lsc, lsrun, and lscap commands will be available in your .local/bin directory. In addition, if you’re planning on embedding scripts in your own Python program, the Bardolph support code will be importable.
To get a copy of the sample script files, you should get the full source tree.
git clone https://github.com/al-fontes-jr/bardolph
Testing the Installation
Note
The lsrun, lscap, and lsc commands are small Python programs that are installed in .local/bin in your home directory, such as:
~/.local/bin/lscap
because of this, you’ll probably want to add ~/.local/bin to your PATH.
A more brute-force method is to use sudo pip when installing, which makes the commands available to every user with no changes to the path. However, that has a system-wide effect that you probably want to avoid. Another alternative is to use virtualenv.
To do a quick sanity check:
lsrun -h
This should display a help screen. To verify access to your actual lights:
lscap
This will discover the lights on the network and output a plain-text report with the state of each light it finds. If you don’t have any lights, but still want to test the installaton, use fakes, which are software simulations of real lights:
lscap -f
As another quick test, you can try turning all the lights off and on again from the command line:
lsrun -s "off all"
lsrun -s "on all"
The source distribution includes some examples in a directory named scripts. For example:
lsrun scripts/on-all.ls
The -f flag works here as well, which allows you to try out scripts without accessing any actual lights.
Note that the above commands are documented in Command-Line Tools.
Alternative: Build and Install
You can use this process if you want to build from source and install the local package. In this case, you should still use pip as your package manager, so that you can use it later to remove your build and clean out unwanted files.
To do this, you need to have setuptools installed.
With setuptools on your system:
pip install lifxlan
git clone https://github.com/al-fontes-jr/bardolph
cd bardolph
python setup.py sdist bdist_wheel
pip install --no-index --find-links ./dist bardolph
Note that the invocation of setup.py creates the dist directory. Within that directory, it creates a .whl file containing the new package. When you run pip, it finds that file and installs it. You need to install lifxlan manually because the installation of bardolph is limited to local files.
Although it isn’t necessary, you may want to try running the Python unit tests to validate your copy of the source code and Python environment:
python -m tests.every_test
When you get a newer release of the code, you can upgrade it with:
python setup.py bdist
pip install --upgrade --no-index --find-links ./dist bardolph
Uninstalling
Uninstall with:
pip uninstall bardolph
This will work whether you installed a downloaded package, or built and installed a package locally.