Getting Started

Installation

The linode_api4 package can be installed from pypi as shown below:

pip install linode_api4

If you prefer, you can clone the package from github and install it from source:

git clone git@github.com:Linode/linode_api4-python
cd linode_api4
python -m pip install .

Authentication

In order to make requests to the Linode API, you will need a token. To generate one, log in to cloud.linode.com, and on your profile click “Create a Personal Access Token”.

Note

You can also use an OAuth Token to authenticate to the API - see OAuth for details.

When creating a Personal Access Token, you will be prompted for what scopes the token should be created with. These scopes control what parts of your account this token may be used to access - for more information, see OAuth Scopes. Restricting what a token can access is more secure than creating one with access to your entire account, but can be less convenient since you would need to create a new token to access other parts of the account. For the examples on this page, your Personal Access Token must be able to view and create Linode Instances.

Listing your Linode Instances

Using the token you generated above, create a LinodeClient object that will be used for all interactions with the API.:

from linode_api4 import LinodeClient
client = LinodeClient(token)

This object will manage all requests you make through the API. Once it’s set up, you can use it to retrieve and print a list of your Linode Instances:

my_linodes = client.linode.instances()

for current_linode in my_linodes:
    print(current_linode.label)

When retrieving collections of objects from the API, a list-like object is returned, and may be iterated over or indexed as a normal list.

Creating a Linode Instance

In order to create a Linode Instance, we need a few pieces of information:

  • what Region to create the Instance in.

  • what Type of Instance to create.

  • what Image to deploy to the new Instance.

We can query for these values similarly to how we listed our Linode Instances above:

available_regions = client.regions()

We could also use values that we know in advance to avoid the need to query the API. For example, we may know that we want a g6-standard-4 Instance running the linode/debian9 Image. Both objects and IDs are accepted when creating an Instance.:

chosen_region = available_regions[0]


new_linode, password = client.linode.instance_create('g5-standard-4',
                                                     chosen_region,
                                                     image='linode/debian9')

instance_create() returns the newly-created Instance object and the root password that was generated for it. This Instance will boot automatically, and should be available shortly. Finally, let’s print out the results so we can access our new server.

print("ssh root@{} - {}".format(new_linode.ipv4[0], password))

Continue on to Core Concepts