avmpi_scripts

The home of the Smithsonian Library and Archives Audiovisual Media Preservation Initiative's software automations

🚧 this repo is under construction 🚧

Pre-Install

Before installing, check out this wiki page for important pre-install setup notes.

Installation

Clone the repo to anywhere on your machine

I suggest /home/your_username/code/ as the parent directory, so the local path to this repo would be /home/your_username/code/avmpi_scripts

Set up Virtual Environment

In order to protect your system's version of Python and any various packages it utilizes, we need to create our own separate Python environment in this repo.

To do this, we use the venv module

Navigate to the top level directory of this repo and run the following command

python3 -m venv venv

Start the Virtual Environment

Now that we have our virtual environment initialized, we need to run it so that we can install our dependencies and run the scripts.

To do that on Mac, run

source venv/bin/activate

Install dependencies

All of the dependencies are detailed in requirements.txt. To install them, use

python3 -m pip -r requirements.txt

This will take a minute, you'll see a lot of text onscreen.

You should now be all set to run the scripts!

Troubleshooting

If you get a ModuleNotFoundError or ImportError when you run a script, you can install the offending module to the venv using

python3 -m pip install [module_name]

Airtable configuration

In order to integrate Airtable and Python, we need to link your Airtable account with the script. This is done through the use of a Personal Access Token (PAT).

Create a Personal Access Token

Follow the official documentation at this link.

For Name, use: YourFirstName_avmpi_scripts

For Scopes, use:

data.records:read
See the data in records

data.records:write
Create, edit, and delete records

schema.bases:read
See the structure of a base, like table names or field types

For Access, we only need access to the Assets base

Add PAT to Airtable config

Now that you have a personal access token, we need to add it to the Airtable config so that our scripts can use it. Open airtable_config.json in your favorite text editor, find the api_key key, and paste your PAT between the quotation marks on the value side. It should look like: "api_key": "pat1234",