Initializing a FireflyClient instance

Once a Firefly server has been identified, the connection parameters can be used to initialize a FireflyClient instance. By default, the value of the environment variable FIREFLY_URL will be used as the server URL, if defined. If FIREFLY_URL is not defined, the default server URL is http://localhost:8080/firefly which is often used for a Firefly server running locally.

Optional arguments for initializing a FireflyClient instance include channel and html_file.

For a default server running locally, use localhost or 127.0.0.1 together with the port that the server is using, and append /firefly. The default port is 8080.

import firefly_client
fc = firefly_client.FireflyClient('http://127.0.0.1:8080/firefly')

If the Python session is running on your own machine, you can use the FireflyClient.launch_browser() method to open up a browser tab.

fc.launch_browser()

The FireflyClient.launch_browser() method will return two values: a boolean indicating whether the web browser open was successful, and the URL for your web browser.

Warning

On Mac OS X 10.12.5, an error message may be displayed with a URL and a note that it doesn’t understand the “open location message”. If a browser tab is not automatically opened, copy and paste the displayed URL into the address bar of your browser. This issue has been fixed in Mac OS X 10.12.6.

If your Python session is not running on your local machine, the FireflyClient.launch_browser() method will display the URL for your web browser. Alternatively, you can use the FireflyClient.display_url() method to print the browser URL if running in a terminal, and to show a clickable link if running in a Jupyter notebook.

fc.display_url()

In typical usage, it is unnecessary to set the channel parameter when instantiating FireflyClient. A unique string will be auto-generated. If you do wish to set the channel explicitly, e.g. for sharing your display with someone else, take care to make the channel unique.

Warning

After initializing FireflyClient, make sure you have opened a web browser to the appropriate URL, before proceeding to use the Python API described in the following sections.