Welcome to pyanywhere

Get Started

These pages contain a brief overview of how this module works.

Introduction

This module is a wrapper of the PythonAnywhere API. Like the Discord.py library, it defines classes for everything, such as users and consoles.

The User class is very important because you have to use it to access anything else. If you are running this module on PythonAnywhere, you can use the get_current_user to create a User object that represents your user:

>>> from pyanywhere.users import get_current_user
>>> user = get_current_user()
>>> user.name
'joe_mama'

Every User object needs an API token. When you call get_current_user, it gets the token using the API_TOKEN environment variable. If you are running this module outside of PythonAnywhere, or you want to access the API through a different user, you can manually create a User object. The constructor accepts two arguments: the username and the API token:

>>> from pyanywhere.users import User
>>> user = User('username', 'XXXXXXX')

Like I said earlier, this object is necessaary to access other things. For example, this is how you print the names of all your consoles:

>>> for console in user.get_consoles():
...     print(console.name)
...
Bash console 14000012
Bash console 14042069

Consoles

This module has a Console class for dealing with consoles. It allows you to read from and write to consoles, as well as kill and start them. The get_consoles method in the User object is a generator that yields Console objects representing all of the consoles the user owns.

Every console on PythonAnywhere is started with an executable name, arguments, and working directory:

  • The executable name is the command used to start the console, and when this executable stops running, the console is closed. For example, Bash console have bash set as the executable.
  • The arguments specify the command line arguments passed to the executable. For example, if you want to start a Bash console with verbose mode enabled, you can set arguments to '--verbose'.
  • The working directory specifies the initial working directory the console runs in. When you start a console using the PythonAnywhere website, this is always set to your home directory.

Reading from and writing to consoles

Console objects have two methods for I/O: get_latest_output and send_input. According to the official API help page, get_latest_output gives you approximately the 500 most recent characters of the console’s output. It accepts a boolean argument named replace_newlines which tells whether or not to replace \r\n with \n. It is False by default. This code plays back the most recent output from a console:

>>> import time
>>> for char in console.get_latest_output(replace_newlines=True):
...     print(char, end='')
...     time.sleep(0.1)
...
(console output will slowly appear)

API Reference

API Reference

Users

class pyanywhere.users.User(name, token=None)

The User class represents a PythonAnywhere user. It is the central object because it has to be used in order to access anything else. When running this module from PythonAnywhere, the pyanywhere.users.get_current_user() function can be used to automatically generate this object.

Parameters:
  • name – The username.
  • token – The API token that is associated with the user.
get_consoles()

This method gets the consoles that are running on the user.

Returns:A geterator yielding pyanywhere.consoles.Console objects.
get_shared_consoles()

A variant of get_consoles() that yields consoles shared with the user.

start_console(exec_name, args, working_dir)

This method starts a new console.

Parameters:
  • exec_name – The name of the executable used for the console. For example, you can set this to 'bash' to start a Bash console.
  • args – The command line arguments passed to exec_name. This must be a string.
  • working_dir – The initial working directory of the console.
Returns:

A pyanywhere.consoles.Console object.
pyanywhere.users.get_current_user()

This function can be used to return a pyanywhere.users.User object if this module is running on PythonAnyhwere. It gets your username by getting your Linux username, and it gets your API token from the API_TOKEN environment variable.

Consoles

class pyanywhere.consoles.Console(id, owner, executable, arguments, working_dir, name, url, frame_url)

Represents a console. Can be retrieved from the pyanywhere.users.User class.

get_latest_output(replace_newlines=False)

Gets the latest output from the console. This will contain CRLF (Windows, \r\n) newlines. According to the API’s help page, this will return approximately 500 characters.

Parameters:replace_newlines – Replace \r\n with \n.
Returns:A string
kill()

Kills the console.

send_input(data)

Sends a string to the console’s stdin (types into the console).

Parameters:data – The string to send to the console.