deltachat python bindings¶
This package provides bindings to the deltachat-core Rust -library which implements IMAP/SMTP/MIME/PGP e-mail standards and offers a low-level Chat/Contact/Message API to user interfaces and bots.
Installing pre-built packages (Linux-only)¶
If you have a Linux system you may try to install the deltachat
binary “wheel” packages
without any “build-from-source” steps. Otherwise you need to compile the Delta Chat bindings
yourself.
We recommend to first install virtualenv, then create a fresh Python virtual environment and activate it in your shell:
virtualenv venv # or: python -m venv
source venv/bin/activate
Afterwards, invoking python
or pip install
only
modifies files in your venv
directory and leaves
your system installation alone.
For Linux, we automatically build wheels for all github PR branches
and push them to a python package index. To install the latest
github master
branch:
pip install --pre -i https://m.devpi.net/dc/master deltachat
To verify it worked:
python -c "import deltachat"
Note
If you can help to automate the building of wheels for Mac or Windows, that’d be much appreciated! please then get in contact with us.
Running tests¶
After successful binding installation you can install a few more Python packages before running the tests:
python -m pip install pytest pytest-xdist pytest-timeout pytest-rerunfailures requests
pytest -v tests
This will run all “offline” tests and skip all functional end-to-end tests that require accounts on real e-mail servers.
running “live” tests with temporary accounts¶
If you want to run live functional tests you can set DCC_NEW_TMP_EMAIL
:
export DCC_NEW_TMP_EMAIL=https://testrun.org/new_email?t=1h_4w4r8h7y9nmcdsy
With this, pytest runs create ephemeral e-mail accounts on the http://testrun.org server. These accounts exists for one 1hour and then are removed completely. One hour is enough to invoke pytest and run all offline and online tests:
pytest
# or if you have installed pytest-xdist for parallel test execution pytest -n6
Each test run creates new accounts.
Installing bindings from source (Updated: July 2020)¶
Install Rust and Cargo first. The easiest is probably to use rustup.
Bootstrap Rust and Cargo by using rustup:
curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh
Then clone the deltachat-core-rust repo:
git clone https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-core-rust
cd deltachat-core-rust
To install the Delta Chat Python bindings make sure you have Python3 installed. E.g. on Debian-based systems apt install python3 python3-pip python3-venv should give you a usable python installation.
Ensure you are in the deltachat-core-rust/python directory, create the virtual environment and activate it in your shell:
cd python
python3 -m venv venv # or: virtualenv venv
source venv/bin/activate
You should now be able to build the python bindings using the supplied script:
python install_python_bindings.py
The core compilation and bindings building might take a while, depending on the speed of your machine. The bindings will be installed in release mode but with debug symbols. The release mode is currently necessary because some tests generate RSA keys which is prohibitively slow in non-release mode.
Building manylinux based wheels¶
Building portable manylinux wheels which come with libdeltachat.so can be done with docker-tooling.
using docker pull / premade images¶
We publish a build environment under the deltachat/coredeps
tag so
that you can pull it from the hub.docker.com
site’s “deltachat”
organization:
$ docker pull deltachat/coredeps
This docker image can be used to run tests and build Python wheels for all interpreters:
$ docker run -e DCC_NEW_TMP_EMAIL \
--rm -it -v \$(pwd):/mnt -w /mnt \
deltachat/coredeps ci_scripts/run_all.sh
Optionally build your own docker image¶
If you want to build your own custom docker image you can do this:
$ cd deltachat-core # cd to deltachat-core checkout directory
$ docker build -t deltachat/coredeps ci_scripts/docker_coredeps
This will use the ci_scripts/docker_coredeps/Dockerfile
to build
up docker image called deltachat/coredeps
. You can afterwards
find it with:
$ docker images
Troubleshooting¶
On more recent systems running the docker image may crash. You can
fix this by adding vsyscall=emulate
to the Linux kernel boot
arguments commandline. E.g. on Debian you’d add this to
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT
in /etc/default/grub
.