[Deprecation Notice] Sunsetting of the lookerapi python SDK (and new SDK releases!)

[srinija_godavar]

tl;dr: The lookerapi python package for accessing the Looker API is deprecated. The unsupported package is now accessible via pip install lookerapi-deprecated. We encourage you to use our new, fully maintained SDK available here.

What’s Happening?

4 New SDKs

In the interest of making it easy to use the Looker API, Looker has previously documented how to use a tool called Swagger Codegen for users to generate their own client SDKs in languages of their choice. Over the years, folks have found it useful to have easier access to SDKs, and some of these user-generated packages have been pushed to various package managers (pip, npm, etc.). Those packages are not and were never officially maintained by Looker, but it’s proven very useful to have quick and easy ways to get started with the Looker API. We’ve noticed that!

If you haven’t heard the news yet, we recently released a new Offical SDK generator called sdk-codegen, and along with it, 4 new official SDKs: Python (beta), Kotlin (alpha), Typescript/Javascript (beta), and Swift (alpha).

The Python and Javascript SDKs are available from pip (pip install looker_sdk) and npm (npm i @looker/sdk) respectively. There is also a Ruby SDK which has not yet been ported over to the new repository, but is maintained & updated. By the way, these packages are all open source and PRs are welcome! 🙂

1 Old SDK Deprecation

In 2018, Looker published a frequently used but never fully supported python SDK, lookerapi. This package is being sunsetted and is now available via pip install lookerapi-deprecated. No other component of the SDK has been altered and all scripts based on it will continue to run as before. The only change is in the installation process. We will be fully sunsetting the package by the end of 2020. We’re doing this to start guiding users to our official python SDK which we’re excited to say is officially maintained — Meaning it’ll be kept up to date with new API versions and be fixed as any issues arise.

What if I am already using the lookerapi package?

If you’ve already downloaded the lookerapi package and are using the samples successfully on a specific version of Python, nothing should change because of this deprecation.

The only explicit change from this deprecation is that you can no longer install a package called lookerapi. If you need to download this old package (e.g you have a script that downloads the package at runtime) you’ll need to run pip install lookerapi-deprecated instead, and we will be sunsetting the ability to download the lookerapi-deprecated package entirely by the end of 2020.

It is worth noting that if you update your version of Python there is no guarantee that the lookerapi-deprecated package will continue to work. Looker is not putting any effort into maintenance of this sample package.

Please migrate to the official Looker SDKs to take advantage of all the benefits of a more robust, official, and actively maintained SDK here.