This guide will cover how to install the data tool and verify that it is working properly. data is distributed as a command line tool.

There are two options for installation:

  1. Installing pre-built binaries. These have no dependencies and will work “out of the box”.
  2. Install via NPM: you need to have node (>= v7.6) and NPM installed.

Installing binaries

  1. Go to the releases page
  2. Download the pre-built binary for your platform (MacOS, LinuxOS x64 or Windows)
  3. Uncompress, make it executable and place into your $PATH (see below for your OS)

Windows MSI

If you’re using MSI for Windows, you can install it in a standard way and jump to the next step.

MacOS

gunzip -f data-macos.gz
chmod +x data-macos
mv data-macos /usr/local/bin/data

If you have an error message saying no such file or directory, you might need to create a directory in your /usr/local/ by running:

mkdir /usr/local/bin

Linux

gunzip -f data-linux.gz
chmod +x data-linux
mv data-linux /usr/local/bin/data

If you encounter errors related to location of xdg-open package, following may help:

cp /usr/bin/xdg-open /usr/local/bin/xdg-open

Windows

This is the suggestion - you can uncompress using your preferred way. The path may change depending on your OS distribution and configurations:

gzip -d data-win.exe.gz
move data-win.exe "C:\Windows\System32\data.exe"

Installing via NPM

You can also install it from NPM as follows:

npm install -g data-cli

Verifying the Installation

To test that data has installed correctly run:

data --version

This should output a version number, e.g.:

0.8.9

You can also run help command to see how to use this tool:

data --help

A first step

Finally, and as a last test, you can try out your first ❒ data command: info.

Note: This command makes no changes to anything on your machine or on the DataHub so it is completely safe to try out!

The info command provides info on a data file or dataset whether it is on the DataHub or your local disk. Here’s an example for you to try:

data info https://datahub.io/core/finance-vix/datapackage.json

It should look something like this:

CBOE Volatility Index (VIX) time-series dataset including daily open, close, high and low …

Learn more about data tool here »

Next step - publish data

As you now have everything setup, you can try to learn how to publish data - follow these instructions. Here is the preview of how easy it is: