Question

To trigger the update you have to visit a url in the browser. This script was made in shell to do it:

#!/bin/bash
# Bash to initiate Solr Delta Import Handler

# Setup Variables
hostName=localhost
portNum=8080
SOLRPATH=/solr
SOLR='delta-import&clean=false'
STATUS='dataimport?command=status'
urlCmd='http://${hostName}:${portNum}${SOLRPATH}/dataimport?command=${SOLRCMD}"

# Operations
curl $URLCMD 

I have tried to write this in Python, this is how far I got:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

# Setup Variables
hostName='localhost'
portNum='8080'
SOLRPATH='/solr'
SOLRCMD='delta-import&clean=false'
STATUSCMD='dataimport?command=status'
urlCmd='http://${hostName}:${portNum}${SOLRPATH}/dataimport?command=${SOLRCMD}'

# Alternative to Curl {URLCMD}

So basically I have two questions:

1. Is my python code ok so far?
2. What is a simple alterantive to Curl in python? The event is normally triggered just by visiting the URL but I dont know how to do this in Python simply.

Answer 1

First of all, use one of these kinds of string formatting in Python:

urlCmd='http://{0}:{1}{2}/dataimport?command={3}'.format(hostName,portnum, SOLRPATH, SOLRCMD)
#or
urlCmd='http://%s:%s%s/dataimport?command=%s' % (hostName,portnum, SOLRPATH, SOLRCMD)

While there is pycurl in python that uses libcurl, you should use a builtin module like urllib2 to access the URL you generated if you want your script to stay portable.

import urllib2
req = urllib2.urlopen(urlCmd)

Now there are several things you can do with your request:

req.close      req.fileno     req.getcode    req.headers    req.msg  
req.read       req.readlines  req.code       req.fp         req.geturl   
req.info       req.next       req.readline   req.url

While most of the methods are self explanatory, refer to the urllib2 docs for a detailed explanation of what they do.