Pooch: A friend to fetch your data files

Leonardo Uieda, Santiago R. Soler, Rémi Rampin, Hugo van Kemenade, Matthew Turk, Daniel Shapero, Anderson Banihirwe and John Leeman (2020)

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Abstract

Scientific software is usually created to acquire, analyze, model, and visualize data. As such, many software libraries include sample datasets in their distributions for use in documentation, tests, benchmarks, and workshops. A common approach is to include smaller datasets in the GitHub repository directly and package them with the source and binary distributions (e.g., scikit-learn and scikit-image do this). As data files increase in size, it becomes unfeasible to store them in GitHub repositories. Thus, larger datasets require writing code to download the files from a remote server to the user's computer. The same problem is faced by scientists using version control to manage their research projects. While downloading a data file over HTTPS can be done easily with modern Python libraries, it is not trivial to manage a set of files, keep them updated, and check for corruption. For example, scikit-learn, Cartopy, and PyVista all include code dedicated to this particular task. Instead of scientists and library authors recreating the same code, it would be best to have a minimalistic and easy to set up tool for fetching and maintaining data files.

Pooch is a Python library that fills this gap. It manages a data registry (containing file names, SHA-256 cryptographic hashes, and download URLs) by downloading files from one or more remote servers and storing them in a local data cache. Pooch is written in pure Python and has minimal dependencies. It can be easily installed from the Python Package Index (PyPI) and conda-forge on a wide range of Python versions: 2.7 (up to Pooch 0.6.0) and from 3.5 to 3.8.

How to cite

Uieda, L., Soler, S.R., Rampin, R., van Kemenade, H., Turk, M., Shapero, D., Banihirwe, A., and Leeman, J. (2020). Pooch: A friend to fetch your data files. Journal of Open Source Software, 5(45), 1943. doi:10.21105/joss.01943