Esri Rolls out Scripting and Automation via the ArcGIS Python API (1.0)

According to Esri, this Python API has been about 18 months in the works, however, judging by the initial response, it has definitely been worth the wait! Enter the Python API 1.0 for ArcGIS – aka. GeoSaurus! The ArcGIS Python API lets ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Enterprise users, analysts, developers and administrators script and automate tasks ranging from performing big data analysis to content management and administration of their web GIS.

What is the Python API?

It is the Python API to your Web GIS, which could be online or on-premises. According to the dev team, the API is modern as it’s a new library built for Python 3 and integrates well with popular Python libraries such as Pandas, Numpy and the SciPy stack. Finally, it uses standard Python idioms and types and avoids introducing a complex type system or API – oh, and it’s Easy!

Who is it for?

If you’re a Web GIS Administrator or a DevOps person, you can automate most of your repetitive tasks and use scripts instead of using the UI and clicking your way through. You can schedule these scripts to run at periodic intervals and do things like standing up Portals or your online org, creating users, assigning roles, creating groups and set access restrictions and so on.

If you’re a content publisher, you can take care of repeated content creation and content validation workflows using scripts. You can clean up and fix stale items in your GIS, script and automate the creation of web maps and web layers, update tiles and features, fix broken links in web maps and layers and update them – doing things that may be tedious or not apparent through the UI.

If you’re an analyst, data scientist or academic user, you can use all of the analytical capabilities of the ArcGIS platform including spatial analysis as well as the recently introduced geoanalytics and raster analytics tools that provide distributed analysis of large datasets.

ArcGIS Python API – Image Credit Esri

A reminder to those GeoDevs who want to dive in and get their hands dirty, A free developer account lets you get started quickly with free credits, features like geocoding, routing and geoenrichment and premium content like demographic and traffic maps from Esri.

Read all about this new resource on the Esri blog in this post titled, ArcGIS Python API 10.0 Released

Developers can get started at https://developers.arcgis.com/python/