Just in time for demoing at the Chaos Computer Congress (where I’m speaking about Componentization and CKAN), datapkg 0.4 has been released. For those who haven’t heard about datapkg before:

datapkg is a tool for distributing, discovering and installing knowledge (data and content) ‘packages’.

datapkg is a simple way to ‘package’ data building on existing packaging tools developed for code. datapkg is designed to integrate closely with the CKAN (Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network).

By putting data in a package, it gets labelled with standardized metadata and can be put in a datapkg repository, such as CKAN or a local one. Once in such a repository, the packages are easy to find and retrieve. [from the docs]

Changes in this release include:

• Major refactoring to simplify and standardize CLI using ‘package specs’
• Support for searching indices from CLI, e.g.:: datapkg search ckan:// myquery
• Simple installation onto disk
• Overhauled and improved documentation and put docs online at http://knowledgeforge.net/ckan/doc/datapkg/

This release of datapkg is still pretty rough around the edges but we now feel its ready for external use (we’ve been “dog-fooding” it ourselves for a while!). So while datapkg is still alpha it’s an alpha that works. If you’re interested in giving it a spin there are installation instructions and once you’ve got it running you can then do things like (from the manual):

Search for a package in an Index e.g. on CKAN.net::

$ datapkg search ckan:// windhover
...
datapkgdemo -- ...
...

Get some information about one of them (in this case our demonstration package on ckan.net)::

$ datapkg info ckan://datapkgdemo

Let’s install one of them (to the current directory)::

$ datapkg install ckan://datapkgdemo .

This will download the Distribution file for Package ‘datapkgdemo’ and unpack it in the current directory ‘.’.

Related posts:

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