Python for STEEM: How to beem

felixxx (68) in busy • 5 years ago (edited)

This is meant as the first part to a series of tutorials.
The goal is to produce a hands-on guide for people who want to jump straight into developing tools for STEEM.

In this part, I will try to guide you through the process of installing beem.
beem is a Python library for STEEM and is based on steem-python, which is based on piston-lib.
While steem-python is the official lib, I chose beem, because it is updated more frequently. ( At this time, the last update to steem-python is 9 months old)

While it is possible to install Python and beem on Windows, I will start by setting up a virtual machine, which I will install Linux on.
In my opinion, this has multiple benefits, the main one being that it will encapsulate your development environment; Whatever abomination you code up, it will not be able to wreck your main operating system - In the worst case, you can stop the virtual machine and start it again.

I believe this method to be the easiest for most people.
If you want to install beem on a different system, this is not the right guide for you. If you can figure it out on your own, you can jump a chapter ahead.

VMware

There is a free version of VMware, which is ideal for our purposes:
https://www.vmware.com/products/workstation-player.html
Make sure to download the Workstation Player, as only that is free to use.

Install this, make sure to uncheck the regular updates nonsense.

Ubuntu

I will go with Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS, as that seems to be the most popular choice at the moment.
https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop

Open VMware, create a new virtual machine using a Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS image.

10 GB HDD, 2 GB RAM is enough, perhaps less
You do not need VMware tools
Set a password. I bricked my first Linux ever, by trying to set it up with a blank password.
It does not have to be especially secure.

beem

If you are new to Linux - don't panic ! I don't get it either.
Before doing anything, remove Amazon from you 'Favourites' menu.
If your keyboard layout is not English, you need to go to 'Region and Languages' and add a new keyboard layout, which makes no sense, and is very confusing.

ctrl+alt+t opens a new terminal.
sudo apt-get update
Apparently, this will update your system.
It is always recommended. Once you have a running bot for STEEM, this might completely ruin your day, though.

Note:
ctrl+c, ctrl+v do not work like they do in Windows.
This is just to confuse everybody.

sudo apt-get install build-essential libssl-dev python-dev
yes
sudo apt install python3-pip
yes
sudo pip3 install beem
yes

Test

The easiest way to test, if it went right, is to:
beempy --help
beempy is a wallet that is built on beem.
If you see a list of help topics, you have successfully set up beem.

To test your first own script, create a new file:
gedit beemtest.py
This will open a text editor.

from beem.blockchain import Blockchain
blockchain = Blockchain()
print(blockchain.get_current_block_num())

paste the above 3 lines of code and save the file.
python3 beemtest.py
This will execute your script and should print the current head-block number on your screen.

Congratulations

If it did not work as intended, comment below.

I hope @flipstar gets to test this.
Also mentioning @revisesociology for good measure.

-> Part 2

busy steem beem python tutorial

5 years ago by felixxx (68)

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steemchiller (74) · 5 years ago

ctrl+c, ctrl+v do not work like they do in Windows

Just in case you don't know:
In Linux terminal it works with ctrl+shift+c and ctrl+shift+v

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12 votes

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felixxx (68) · 5 years ago

No, I didn't know.

To make matters worse: It works inside gedit.

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bluerobo (61) · 5 years ago

Good stuff. Wanted to get started with that anyways. Now I'm taking the lazy route instead of tinkering myself :)
!BEER

Posted using Partiko Android

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isnochys (66) · 5 years ago

How to !BEER !
:)

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[-]

beerlover (62) · 5 years ago

Command accepted!

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[-]

beerlover (62) · 5 years ago

^{View or trade BEER.}

Hey @felixxx, here is a little bit of BEER for you. Enjoy it!

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mytechtrail (59) · 5 years ago

I am more of a virtualbox user myself, but I also run Ubuntu 18.04 on my primary desktop computer anyways.

Very interested in where you take these posts as I would like to write some Python code to track and log my Steem data using some of the metrics that I manually get from steemworld.org and steemitboard.com currently.

You might also want to add a STEM tag to get some rewards from that community.

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felixxx (68) · 5 years ago (edited)

I did not think of the STEM tag. I used up the 5 tags that busy.org allows me to use ...

Depending on what you want to do, I could just work on that.

Which data do you need, how do you want it exported ?

edit: I wanted to take this all the way to SMT creation ...

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mytechtrail (59) · 5 years ago

I have tried reading the beem documentation and either do not understand enough Python to properly use it, or some of the stuff I want is not directly callable.

I think I replied to my comment to answer your original question so I do not know if you get notified.

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felixxx (68) · 5 years ago

The documentation isn't great.
If it is part of steemworld.org, it is most likely directly callable.

In the next part, I was just going to look at a full block and how STEEM stores data.

Some parts further, I will explain how I read the source code to look at every function.

In the end, this tutorial should enable you to do all the things you mentioned in the other comment.

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1 vote

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mytechtrail (59) · 5 years ago

Thanks that sounds exactly the kind of information I am looking for.

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mytechtrail (59) · 5 years ago

For now things like posts, comments, votes(received-given), SP vested, SP delegated and reputation. Eventually I would like to be able to run queries like who I have voted for and who has voted for me. I know there are many different web pages to get most of this, but as I am learning Python I would like the experience of writing the code myself.