olca-ipc 0.0.4

A Python package for calling openLCA functions from Python.

openLCA provides an implementation of an JSON-RPC based protocol for inter-process communication (IPC). With this, it is possible to call functions in openLCA and processing their results outside of openLCA. The olca-ipc package provides a convenience API for using this IPC protocol from standard Python (Cpython v3.6+) so that it is possible to use openLCA as a data storage and calculation engine and combine it with the libraries from the Python ecosystem.

The openLCA IPC protocol is based on the openLCA data exchange format which is specified in the olca-schema repository. The olca-ipc package provides a class based implementation of the openLCA data exchange format and an API for communicating with an openLCA IPC server via instances of these classes.

The current stable version of olca-ipc is available via the Python Package Index. Thus, in order to use it, you can just install (and uninstall) it with pip:

pip install -U olca-ipc

In order to communicate with openLCA, you first need to start an openLCA IPC server. You can do this via the user interface in openLCA under Window > Developer Tools > IPC Server. The IPC server runs on a specific port, e.g. 8080, to which you connect from an IPC client:

import olca
client = olca.Client(8080)

An instance of the olca.Client class is then a convenient entry point for calling functions of openLCA and processing their results. Please see the package documentation for more information and examples.