pytivo ported to python3

Over thanksgiving break I decided to port pytivo (wmcbrine's version) completely to python3. In the process I also tried to clean up some of the code.

If you're interested, here it is:
itsayellow/pytivo

It is installable as a python package via pip or pipx, which makes installation a little nicer and a little more portable.

For some help text, execute:
pytivo --help

I may not be super available for supporting end users, but the code is pretty solid and I've been using it for some months now without problem.

The main difference from the original pytivo is probably where it searches for pyTivo.conf. Here are the new locations:

• /etc/pyTivo.conf
• In your home directory: .config/pytivo/pyTivo.conf
• In the directory you started pytivo from: pyTivo.conf
• You can also specify the full path to your desired pyTivo.conf using the -c option.

For developers, it may be of note that the entire code is also statically typed with python type hints and can be verified using mypy.

Since python 2 is EOL this year, hopefully this is also useful going forward for other developers.

 

That's another change from the old pytivo I guess.

The best way of running this is to install this using pipx. Once you do that, you should have a command on your path called 'pytivo' executable from anywhere.

Installation example if you downloaded pytivo to directory <Some_Directory>/pytivo (replace <Some_Directory> with whatever directory is the parent of your pytivo directory.)

1. python -m pip install --user pipx
2. pipx install <Some_Directory>/pytivo

pipx will install pytivo (or pytivo.exe on Windows) in your home directory to: .local/bin/ . If this is in your PATH, then pytivo will be executable anywhere. You can also run it explicitly from that path.


The more technical answer is, there are a number of python packages that need to be installed to make this new pytivo work. The installation method above handles this automatically. If you know what you're doing and install all the python packages needed yourself, then to run pytivo you can also execute:

python src/pytivo/main.py​

 

I just updated the install directions on the main page for my fork of pytivo:
itsayellow/pytivo

I tried to find the right balance of enough information but not too much! But that balance is a little tricky. Hopefully those instructions are complete enough without being overwhelming.

 

Thanks for the note, that's good to know! I looked, but I couldn't find any python3 pytivo ports on my own...might have saved me some work

 

@mlippert , I also don't have a ton of bandwidth, but was happy to see another python3 port.

I will say I was pleasantly surprised how much benefit using type hints gave me. Not only did it make porting much faster in the end, but I believe I may have found some bugs that had been hiding in pytivo for a while. It certainly eased tracking down all the str/bytes bugs that popped up in the transition from python2 to python3.

 

Well, I think the main thing is that Python 2 will not be supported anymore (EOL). "...January 1, 2020, will be the day that we sunset Python 2. That means that we will not improve it anymore after that day, even if someone finds a security problem in it."
Sunsetting Python 2

Going forward, there won't be many libraries that still support python 2.

Other than that, I find python 3 much more pleasant to program in, it has a lot of nice features and syntax than python 2. Python 2.7 was released in 2010, a lot of nice stuff has happened since then in Python 3.