Controlling Paraview GUI from Python IDLE

Question

I am trying to control Paraview interactively using IDLE. This would involve sending commands from IDLE and seeing the changes occur in Paraview. I would rather not use the

Answer 1

I built paraview against my system python so that I could use ipython and other packages. I just had to set my PYTHONPATH to point to the paraview python site packages and the LD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to the paraview lib directory.

export PYTHONPATH=/path/to/paraview/install/lib/python2.7/site-packages
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/paraview/install/lib

$ ipython 
Python 2.7.15rc1 (default, Nov 12 2018, 14:31:15) 
Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

IPython 5.5.0 -- An enhanced Interactive Python.
?         -> Introduction and overview of IPython's features.
%quickref -> Quick reference.
help      -> Python's own help system.
object?   -> Details about 'object', use 'object??' for extra details.

In [1]: from paraview.simple import *

In [2]: Connect("localhost")
Out[2]: Connection (cs://localhost:11111) [2]

In [3]: Cone()
Out[3]: 

In [4]: Show()
Out[4]: 

In [5]: GetSources()
Out[5]: {('Cone1', '8803'): }

In [6]: GetActiveSource()
Out[6]: 

Screen shot of the rendered cone from the ipython paraview client

My paraview version was built from master on Ubuntu 18.04.

The only issue I had was a missing __init__.py file in the python site-packages/paraview/modules directory.

In [1]: from paraview.simple import *
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
ImportError                               Traceback (most recent call last)
 in ()
----> 1 from paraview.simple import *

/home/dustin/repos/paraview_builds/master/install/lib/python2.7/site-packages/paraview/simple.py in ()
     39 
     40 import paraview
---> 41 from paraview import servermanager
     42 import paraview._backwardscompatibilityhelper
     43 

/home/dustin/repos/paraview_builds/master/install/lib/python2.7/site-packages/paraview/servermanager.py in ()
     54 from paraview import _backwardscompatibilityhelper as _bc
     55 
---> 56 from paraview.modules.vtkPVServerImplementationCore import *
     57 from paraview.modules.vtkPVClientServerCoreCore import *
     58 from paraview.modules.vtkPVServerManagerCore import *

ImportError: No module named modules.vtkPVServerImplementationCore

I got around this by just creating an __init__.py file in the paraview/modules directory:

touch /path/to/paraview/install/lib/python2.7/site-packages/paraview/modules/__init__.py