command_line_basics_unix

OpenEIS Command Line Basics (Unix)

Introduction

This section describes basic command-line interactions with OpenEIS, under a Unix-like shell:

• Activating the virtual environment
• Starting the server
• Killing the server
• Running an application

## Activating the virtual environment

OpenEIS generally should be run through a virtual environment. See the installation guide for details on creating a virtual environment.

To activate the virtual environment from subdirectory env:

> source  env/bin/activate

The command prompt should change to include (openeis) as a prefix. For brevity, the sample code does not show this prefix.

A more rigorous way to verify that the virtual environment is running is to check that the python command runs the appropriate interpreter:

> which python
openeis_root/env/bin/python

where openeis_root is the root directory that contains the OpenEIS project files. If python does not refer to the executable in the virtual environment, try removing the env directory and creating a new virtual environment, as described in the installation guide.

## Starting the server

After activating the virtual environment, run the OpenEIS server by:

> openeis  runserver

It should now be possible to open a web browser to the main entry point, http://localhost:8000. The server also supports a number of useful API pages.

## Killing the server

In general, entering Control-C in the same terminal used to start the server, will stop the server (on a Mac, Command-. may be used instead).

However, it is possible to get into a state where the server is no longer running, but still claims the port. In this case, trying to run the server gives an error message like "That port is already in use."

To kill the server, first find out the process identifier of the process holding the port. Try:

> ps aux  |  grep -i runserver

However, if some other process than runserver actually holds the port, this won't work.

It may be possible to identify the process using lsof:

> lsof -P  |  grep localhost:8000

It is also possible to identify the port using netstat. However, not all netstat implementations include the process identifier in the output:

> netstat -an  |  grep 8000

The fuser utility can list the process holding the port (however, this doesn't work on a Mac):

> fuser  8000/tcp

After identifying the process holding the port, kill it:

> kill -9  <pid-of-interest>

## Running an application

Running an application from the command line requires first creating a configuration file that specifies the application inputs.

To run the application, activate the virtual environment if necessary, then:

> openeis runapplication  your_configuration_file.ini

The application should write a .csv file containing its results, as well as a .log file.