Python cheat sheet for InfluxDB2 (influxdb_client)

Posted on March 02, 2021 Note that this post is older than 3 years and might contain out-of-date information. Tags: #data #docker #technology #cheatsheet #linux

Setup InfluxDB test instance with Docker

docker run -d -p 8086:8086 --name influxdb influxdb

This command pulls the latest InfluxDB image from Docker Hub, runs it with the name influxdb and makes the default port 8086 available on localhost. Once the container is up and running, we need to setup InfluxDB before we can use it.

Open a shell in the InfluxDB container:

docker exec -it influxdb bash

Start the interactive setup wizard by running influx setup. The wizard will ask you to provide initial admin credentials, your first organization, your first bucket and a retention period for it.

I have created a user val with a password (invisible in the wizard), an organization called my_org and a bucket my_bucket:

root@d8818fce8c18:/# influx setup
Welcome to InfluxDB 2.0!
Please type your primary username: val

Please type your password:

Please type your password again:

Please type your primary organization name: my_org

Please type your primary bucket name: my_bucket

Please type your retention period in hours.
Or press ENTER for infinite.:

Lastly, the wizard will ask you to confirm your inputs:

You have entered:
  Username:          val
  Organization:      my_org
  Bucket:            my_bucket
  Retention Period:  infinite
Confirm? (y/n): y

Config default has been stored in /root/.influxdbv2/configs.
User    Organization    Bucket
val     my_org          my_bucket

One advantage of performing the setup using the CLI is that it writes your initial admin user’s credentials to a config file, allowing you to manage your InfluxDB instance using the influx CLI directly with admin privileges.

We’ll use this to get our initial admin user’s token, which we’ll use later to set up the connection to InfluxDB in Python.

influx auth list gives us a list of existing users and tokens. For the sake of readability I’m using awk to limit output to just the token.

root@d8818fce8c18:/# influx auth list | awk 'FNR>1 {print $4}'
_U13AGG9YWojXjuh2OAUKqtsA20Fual8Vt_aVTvdJ1eWUJu0pH85ppkCEM3lL5hEpNS_8vPRh7nik8QkEvfZFA==

Save your token somewhere to have it at hand for the Connection setup step.

Now, we can exit the container shell:

root@d8818fce8c18:/# exit


Install influxdb_client with pip

Depending on your setup and linux distro you might want to do this with the distro’s package manager.

pip3 install influxdb-client # NOT 'influx-client' or 'influxdb'!


Connection setup (required for all steps below)

import influxdb_client

my_client = influxdb_client.InfluxDBClient(
  url=my_url,
  token=my_token,
  org='my_org'
)

To connect to the docker test instance, use the token obtained after the InfluxDB setup:

import influxdb_client

my_client = influxdb_client.InfluxDBClient(
  url='http://localhost:8086',
  token='_U13AGG9YWojXjuh2OAUKqtsA20Fual8Vt_aVTvdJ1eWUJu0pH85ppkCEM3lL5hEpNS_8vPRh7nik8QkEvfZFA==',
  org='my_org'
)


Test connection

my_client.ready()

{'started': datetime.datetime(2021, 2, 23, 16, 5, 29, 916723, tzinfo=tzlocal()),
 'status': 'ready',
 'up': '47m11.068245257s'}


Query data


Get query api

Firstly, obtain a query API instance:

influxdb_query_api = my_client.query_api()

Create a query

Check out the official documentation for the Flux query language to learn how to build queries.

This is a very basic example getting all data points of the measurement my_measurement from the last 100 minutes in my_bucket.

query = 'from(bucket:"my_bucket")\
|> range(start: -100m)\
|> filter(fn:(r) => r._measurement == "my_measurement")'

Run a query

result = influxdb_query_api.query(org='my_org', query=query)

See the official InfluxDB documentation for ways to use the result data including an example script.


Get dict from data point

For this example I have created a data point as shown here.

Assuming you have a influxdb_client.Point object, a dict representation of it’s contents can be obtained like so:

point.__dict__

The output will look something like this:

{'_tags': {'my_tag': 'my_value'}, '_fields': {'my_first_field': 'my second field value'}, '_name': 'my_measurement', '_time': datetime.datetime(2021, 3, 3, 13, 54, 7, 692337), '_write_precision': 'ms'}


Write data


Get write api

You need to specify which write option the client shall use when creating the instance. At the time of writing this post the possible write options are: synchronous, asynchronous, batching

There are shortcuts for synchronous and asynchronous.

influxdb_client.client.write_api.SYNCHRONOUS

influxdb_client.client.write_api.ASYNCHRONOUS

batching is accessible by creating an WriteOptions instance and passing it the WriteType of batching:

influxdb_client.client.write_api.WriteOptions(influxdb_client.client.write_api.WriteType.batching)

Using the write option, that you’ve decided for, you can get a write api instance:

influxdb_write_api = my_client.write_api(write_options=influxdb_client.client.write_api.SYNCHRONOUS)

Write a data point

A data point is created from an influxdb_client.Point object. To put our data in, we can either:

  • use various functions of the Point object itself
  • pass it a dict

I prefer using a dict, because I think it’s much more readable and easy to understand. This might be especially useful for people who know Python but are not perfectly familiar with how influxdb_client.Point objects work in detail.

my_time must be a timestamp, that InfluxDB understands.

point = influxdb_client.Point.from_dict(
    {
        'measurement': 'my_measurement',
        'tags': {'my_tag': 'my_value'},
        'fields': {
            'my_first_field': 'my first field value',
            'my_first_field': 'my second field value'
            },
        'time': 'my_time',
    },
    influxdb_client.WritePrecision.MS
)

influxdb_write_api.write('my_bucket', 'my_org', point)

For example, you can use the datetime module:

import datetime

point = influxdb_client.Point.from_dict(
    {
        'measurement': 'my_measurement',
        'tags': {'my_tag': 'my_value'},
        'fields': {
            'my_first_field': 'my first field value',
            'my_first_field': 'my second field value'
            },
        'time': datetime.datetime.now(),
    },
    influxdb_client.WritePrecision.MS
)

influxdb_write_api.write('my_bucket', 'my_org', point)


Buckets

Firstly, obtain a buckets API instance:

influxdb_buckets_api = my_client.buckets_api()

Get all buckets in current org

bucket_objects = influxdb_buckets_api.find_buckets()

Get all bucket names in current org

bucket_objects = influxdb_buckets_api.find_buckets()
bucket_names = [bucket.name for bucket in bucket_objects.buckets]

Get bucket object by bucket name

my_bucket = influxdb_buckets_api.find_bucket_by_name('my_bucket')

Create bucket

See this section for getting my_org_id

new_bucket = influxdb_client.domain.bucket.Bucket(
  name='my_new_bucket',
  retention_rules=[],
  org_id=my_org_id
)
influxdb_buckets_api.create_bucket(new_bucket)

Delete bucket

bucket = influxdb_buckets_api.find_bucket_by_name('my_bucket')
influxdb_buckets_api.delete_bucket(bucket.id)


Organizations

Firstly, obtain a organizations API instance:

influxdb_org_api = influxdb_client.OrganizationsApi(my_client)

Get all organizations

orgs = influxdb_org_api.find_organizations()

Get organization id

Look for your organization in the list of all organizations orgs, which you obtained in the previous step.

for org in orgs:
  if org.name == 'my_org':
    my_org_id = org.id
    print(my_org_id)

Create organization

my_new_org will be the new organization’s name.

influxdb_org_api.create_organization('my_new_org')

Delete organization

To delete an organization, you need it’s ID. See Get organization id.

influxdb_org_api.delete_organization(my_org_id)