Get Started

Use the Tableau Server Client (TSC) library to increase your productivity as you interact with the Tableau Server REST API. With the TSC library you can do almost everything that you can do with the REST API, including:

• Publish workbooks and data sources.
• Create users and groups.
• Query projects, sites, and more.

If you need help or to report issues, refer to the Getting Help page.

This page describes how to:

• Confirm prerequisites
• Install TSC
  • Install with pip (recommended)
  • Install from the development branch
  • Install on an offline machine
• Get the samples
• Write your first program

Confirm prerequisites

Before you install TSC, confirm that you have the following dependencies installed:

• Python. You can use TSC with Python 3.7 or later. Ideally, use a Python version that hasn’t reached end-of-life yet. (Refer to the Status of Python versions).
• Git. Optional, but recommended to download the samples or install from the source code.

Install TSC

You can install TSC with pip or from the source code.

Install with pip (recommended)

Run the following command to install the latest stable version of TSC:

pip install --upgrade pip
pip install tableauserverclient

Install from the development branch

You can install from the development branch for a preview of upcoming features. Run the following command to install from the development branch:

pip install git+https://github.com/tableau/server-client-python.git@development

Note that the version from the development branch should not be used for production code. The methods and endpoints in the development version are subject to change at any time before the next stable release.

Install on an offline machine

To install TSC onto a machine without an internet connection, use the following steps:

1) Ensure that Python is installed.

2) Download and manually install the requests Python library (and its dependencies).

3) Download the setup package.

4) Run pip install ./tableauserverclient-x.y.tar.gz

Get the samples

The TSC samples are included in the samples directory of the TSC repository on Github. You can run the following command to clone the repository:

git clone git@github.com:tableau/server-client-python.git

For more information on the samples and how to run the samples, see Samples.

Write your first program

Run the following code to get a list of all the data sources on your installation of Tableau Server:

import tableauserverclient as TSC

tableau_auth = TSC.TableauAuth('USERNAME', 'PASSWORD', 'SITENAME')
server = TSC.Server('http://SERVER_URL')

with server.auth.sign_in(tableau_auth):
    all_datasources, pagination_item = server.datasources.get()
    print("\nThere are {} datasources on site: ".format(pagination_item.total_available))
    print([datasource.name for datasource in all_datasources])

SERVER_URL is the URL of your Tableau server without subpaths. For local Tableau servers, an example would be: https://www.MY_SERVER.com. For Tableau Cloud, an example would be: https://10ax.online.tableau.com/.

SITENAME is the subpath of your full site URL (also called contentURL in the REST API). MYSITE would be the site name of https://10ax.online.tableau.com/MYSITE. This parameter can be omitted when signing in to the Default site of a on premise Tableau server.

See Sign In and Out for more details about the sign in & out options.