getdevinfo 1.1.0

A device information gatherer for Linux, macOS, and Cygwin/Windows

# getdevinfo

This repository holds my new getdevinfo module. This module was originally integreted directly into the source code of Wine Autostart, DDRescue-GUI, and WxFixBoot, but has now been separated for ease of maintenance. Because it’s on GitLab (https://gitlab.com/hamishmb/getdevinfo) and on PyPI (the Python Package Index) (https://pypi.org/project/getdevinfo/), and released under the GPLv3+, this means other people can use it too.

Description of Package

A device information gatherer for Linux, macOS and Cygwin/Windows.

Working on both Linux, macOS and Cygwin, this script makes use of lshw, lvdisplay, and blkid (Linux), as well as diskutil (macOS) and smartctl and blkid (Cygwin) to get a comprehensive amount of disk information. This information is available in a structured dictionary for ease of use.

NOTE: Cygwin is supported since v1.1.0, Python 2 is unsupported since v1.0.7.

Features:

Uses the operating system’s built-in tools to gather lots of helpful information about disks connected to the system. This is returned as a hierarchical python dictionary. For the full details on the format, read the documentation here: https://www.hamishmb.com/html/Docs/getdevinfo.php

Dependencies:

On Linux it requires lshw, blkid, lvdisplay, and blockdev to be installed. On Cygwin, you need the smartmontools and blkid packages. On Linux and Cygwin, you also need the beautifulsoup4 (bs4), and lxml python packages to use this tool. On macOS, nothing beyond a standard python3.x install is required, but you still need bs4 and lxml if you want to install using the python wheel/through pip.

Building

Source Distribution

Run:

“python setup.py sdist”

Wheels

Make sure you’ve installed the “wheel” package:

“pip3 install wheel”

Universal Wheel

This is the recommended choice, though GetDevInfo no longer runs on Python 2 from version 1.0.7 onwards,

“python3 setup.py bdist_wheel –universal”

Pure Python Wheel

Not sure why you’d do this, but you can run:

“python3 setup.py bdist_wheel”

to acheive this if you want.

Distribution Packages

You can find these at https://www.launchpad.net/getdevinfo or https://www.hamishmb.com/html/downloads.php?program_name=getdevinfo.

Documentation

This can be found at https://www.hamishmb.com/html/Docs/getdevinfo.php.

Running directly from the command line

Run:

“sudo python3 -m getdevinfo.getdevinfo”

Or (v1.0.8 onwards):

“sudo python3 -m getdevinfo”

Running The Tests

These have to be run as the superuser/administrator, because low-level access to hardware is required to gather information.

The process for running these is the same on both Linux and macOS. Note that prior to version 1.0.7, GetDevInfo ran on Python 2 as well.

Without Coverage Reporting

Change directory to the getdevinfo subfolder, and run:

“sudo python3 ./tests.py”

With Coverage Reporting

Make sure you have installed Coverage.py using pip or your package manager.

Change directory to the getdevinfo subfolder, and run:

“sudo python3 -m coverage run –rcfile=../.coveragerc ./tests.py”

To run the tests. Then run:

“sudo python3 -m coverage report”

To see the report.