yelp-python

A Python library for the Yelp API. It simplifies the process of authentication, request construction, and response parsing for Python developers using the Yelp API. This clientlib is built and tested on Python 2.7 and 3.4.

Installation

Install yelp-python from PyPI using:

pip install yelp

Usage

Basics

The library uses a client object to query against the API. Make a client by creating an instance of Oauth1Authenticator with your API key and passing that to the client constructor. You can sign up for an API key at https://www.yelp.com/developers/manage_api_keys.

from yelp.client import Client
from yelp.oauth1_authenticator import Oauth1Authenticator

auth = Oauth1Authenticator(
    consumer_key=YOUR_CONSUMER_KEY,
    consumer_secret=YOUR_CONSUMER_SECRET,
    token=YOUR_TOKEN,
    token_secret=YOUR_TOKEN_SECRET
)

client = Client(auth)

To keep your API access keys secure, we highly recommend putting them in a file which you add to .gitignore. For example, store your keys in a file called config_secret.json.

{
    "consumer_key": "YOUR_CONSUMER_KEY",
    "consumer_secret": "YOUR_CONSUMER_SECRET",
    "token": "YOUR_TOKEN",
    "token_secret": "YOUR_TOKEN_SECRET"
}

Then load it into your code to construct a client.

# read API keys
with io.open('config_secret.json') as cred:
    creds = json.load(cred)
    auth = Oauth1Authenticator(**creds)
    client = Client(auth)

Now you can use the client object to make requests.

Search API

There are three ways to query the Search API: search, search_by_bounding_box, and search_by_coordinates. For each of these methods, additional parameters are optional. The full list of parameters can be found on the Search API Documentation.

params = {
    'term': 'food',
    'lang': 'fr'
}

client.search('San Francisco', **params)

search_by_bounding_box takes a southwest latitude/longitude and a northeast latitude/longitude as the location boundary (details).

client.search_by_bounding_box(
    37.900000,
    -122.500000,
    37.788022,
    -122.399797,
    **params
)

search_by_coordinates takes a geographic coordinate (details).

client.search_by_coordinates(37.788022, -122.399797, **params)

Business API

To query the Business API use the get_business function with a business id. You can also pass in locale parameters as specified in the Business API Documentation.

params = {
    'lang': 'fr'
}

client.get_business('yelp-san-francisco', **params)

Phone Search API

To query the Phone Search API use the phone_search function with a phone number. Additional parameters can be found on Phone Search API Documentation.

params = {
    'category': 'fashion'
}

client.phone_search('+15555555555', **params)

Responses

Responses from the API are parsed into Python objects.

Search and phone search responses are parsed into SearchResponse objects.

>>> response = client.search('San Francisco')

>>> response.businesses
[<Business 1>, <Business 2>, ...]

>>> response.businesses[0].name
u'The Flying Falafel'

>>> response.businesses[0].rating.rating
4.5

Business responses are parsed into BusinessResponse objects.

>>> response = client.get_business('yelp-san-francisco')

>>> response.business.name
u'Yelp'

>>> response.business.categories
[Category(name=u'Local Flavor', alias=u'localflavor'), Category(name=u'Mass Media', alias=u'massmedia')]

For a full list of available response fields, take a look at the documentation or the classes defined in yelp/obj.

Contributing

1. Fork it (http://github.com/yelp/yelp-python/fork)
2. Setup your virtual environment

$ pip install tox
$ tox -e venv
$ . venv-yelp/bin/activate

1. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
2. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
3. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
4. Create new Pull Request

Testing

Please write tests for any new features. We use pytest + tox so just run tox to run the full test suite. Full py.test documentation here.

If you are adding a new integration test, you will need to connect to the Yelp API. You can set this up by creating a file tests/json/credentials_secret.json that contains your API keys in the following format:

{
    "consumer_key": "YOUR_CONSUMER_KEY",
    "consumer_secret": "YOUR_CONSUMER_SECRET",
    "token": "YOUR_TOKEN",
    "token_secret": "YOUR_TOKEN_SECRET"
}

We use VCR.py to record and serialize HTTP requests. Add your test to tests/integration_test.py and use the decorator

@int_vcr.use_cassette(**cassette_params)

The first time you run the test, VCR.py will record the HTTP request to the folder /tests/integration/vcr_cassettes in a yaml file of the same name as the test, filtering out your oauth tokens prior to writing. VCR.py will replay the response for subsequent runs. This allows us to have deterministic tests and continuously integrate with Travis CI. To clear the recorded response, delete the cassette file. Running the test again will make a new HTTP request and record it. For more information, see VCR.py documentation.

Git Workflow

We are using the git flow workflow. Atlassian has a solid overview. Essentially, new development is merged into the develop branch from feature branches, then merged from develop to a release branch, then to master from the release branch. Master should always contain the most recently released version of the library.