Zdesk is seeking a contributing team or maintainer

Active development on zdesk has been pretty slow for some time now. The zdesk port is not official, and has been authored by just myself (Brent). While I have received contributions, I am just one person. Add in a very busy personal life and no direct professional obligation to maintain this library and you have a recipe for stagnation.

I am seeking to connect with users who would be interested in contributing to this project directly (commit access), or otherwise a suitable maintainer to pass this library on to. I think there is a lot of promise in the generator approach to do some more interesting things, but I simply cannot find the time to code it up myself.

If you are interested, please email me directly: brent@fprimex.com

Note about documentation on github

Please refer to the documentation for the specific release you are running.

Releases are listed here.

Zendesk API Wrapper for Python

Zdesk is a Python wrapper for the Zendesk API. This library provides an easy and flexible way for developers to communicate with their Zendesk account in their application.

See the Zendesk developer site for API documentation. The underlying zdesk_api module has been automatically generated from this documentation.

Requirements

Zdesk works with both Python 2 and Python 3. Tested on Python 2.7.5 and 3.4.1.

The requests package is used for authentication and requests

pip install requests

Note that if you are on an earlier version of Python on particular platforms, you can receive an error from urllib3, which is packaged in with requests. The simplest solution is to install or update the packages specified in the solution.

pip install pyopenssl ndg-httpsclient pyasn1

This should be all that is required. If additional steps are required this may be a zdesk bug, so please report it.

Installation

Zdesk is available on pypi, so installation should be fairly simple:

pip install zdesk

Related projects

• zdeskcfg: Automatically configure your zdesk scripts from a configuration file and command line arguments.
• zdgrab: Download and decompress ticket attachments.

Notes on module usage

API Keyword args

Zdesk attempts to identify query string parameters from the online documentation. All query string parameters are optional (default to None), and are provided for convenience and reference.

However, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to accurately capture all valid query parameters for a particular endpoint from the documentation. So, zdesk passes all provided kwargs on to the Zendesk API as query string parameters without validation, except those that it has reserved for its own use. The current reserved kwargs (described in more detail below) are:

• complete_response
• get_all_pages
• mime_type
• retry_on
• max_retries
• raw_query
• retval

There are a few common query string parameters that the Zendesk API accepts for many calls. The current list at the time of this writing is:

• include
• page
• per_page
• sort_by
• sort_order

Results returned and getting all HTTP response info

Under normal circumstances, when a call is made and the response indicates success, the value returned will be formatted to simplify usage. So if a JSON response is returned with the expected return code, then instead of getting back all of the HTTP response information, headers and all, the only thing that is returned is the JSON, which will already be deserialized. In some cases, only a single string in a particular header (location) is returned, and so that will be the return value.

Passing complete_response=True will cause all response information to be returned, which is the result of a requests.request.

Getting a specific part of a result

The Zendesk service sometimes changes what exactly is returned and the automatic return value determination may not be desired. Additionally, it can be tedious to always request complete_response=True and working with all of that information. So, now it is possible to pass retval in order to request a specific part of the request. Valid values are 'content', 'code', 'location', and 'headers'.

For example, you may not care to retrieve the location from a ticket creation, but you do want to check the HTTP return code to ensure success. You can now pass retval='code' and then simply check to ensure that the code is equal to (the integer) 201.

Getting all pages

There is a common pattern where a request will return one page of data along with a next_page location. In order to retrieve all results, it is necessary to continue retrieving every next_page location. The results then all need to be processed together. A loop to get all pages ends up stamped throughout Zendesk code, since many API methods return paged lists of objects.

As a convenience, passing get_all_pages to any API method will do this for you, and will also merge all responses. The result is a single, large object that appears to be the result of one single call. The logic for this combination and reduction is well documented in the source (look for the line reading Now we need to try to combine or reduce the results, if the line number has shifted since this writing).

MIME types for data

By default, all data passed to requests is assumed to be of MIME type application/json. The value of data in this default case should be a JSON object, and it will automatically be converted using json.dumps for the request.

Some endpoints such as those that allow file uploads expect data to be of a different MIME type, and so this can be specified using the mime_type keyword argument.

If working with files of an unknown MIME type, a module such as python-magic can be useful. The following code has worked well with zdesk scripts:

# import, configure, and connect to Zendesk as shown in the example code.
# zd = Zendesk(...

import magic

fname = 'my_file'

mime_type = magic.from_file(fname, mime=True)
if type(mime_type) is bytes:
    mime_type = mime_type.decode()

with open(fname, 'rb') as fp:
    fdata = fp.read()

response = zd.upload_create(filename=fname,
        data=fdata, mime_type=mime_type, complete_response=True)

upload_token = response['content']['upload']['token']

Multipart file uploads (Help Center attachments)

In addition to the data argument, zdesk methods can also take a files argument. This is a tuple which is passed directly to the requests module, so you may wish to reference their documentation.

Here is an example of using the help_center_article_attachment_create method.

zd.help_center_article_attachment_create(article_id='205654433', data={},
        files={'file':('attach.zip', open('attach.zip', 'rb'))})

The data parameter should always be supplied, containing any desired optional parameters such as data={'inline':'true'}, or {} otherwise. The file data can be provided directly in the tuple, and the MIME type can be explicitly specified.

with open('attach.zip', 'rb') as f:
    fdata = f.read()

zd.help_center_article_attachment_create(article_id='205654433', data={},
        files={'file':('attach.zip', fdata, 'application/zip')})

Raw query strings

In some cases it is necessary to pass query parameters that are the same parameter but differ by value, such as multiple start_time or end_time values. This makes it impossible to use a simple dictionary of query parameters and values. To enable this use case it is now possible to pass a string, starting with ?, using raw_query. This value overrides all query parameters that are named or passed with kwargs, and is appended to the URL. The string will be appropriately encoded by requests, so there is no need to pre-encode it before passing.

Rate limits and retrying

It is possible to retry all requests made by an instance of Zendesk by providing retry_on and max_retries to __init__. In addition, it is also possible to retry one Zendesk.call without modifying it's attributes - simply by supplying those kwargs to Zendesk.call.

retry_on specifies on which exceptions raised you want to retry your request. There is also possibility to retry on specific non-200 HTTP codes, also by specyfing them in retry_on. ZendeskError and requests.RequestsError combined are catch-alls.

max_retries controls how many attempts are made if first request fails. Note that with get_all_pages this can make up to (max_retries + 1) * pages requests. Currently there is no support for exponential backoff.

Example Use

from zdesk import Zendesk

################################################################
## NEW CONNECTION CLIENT
################################################################
# Manually creating a new connection object
zendesk = Zendesk('https://yourcompany.zendesk.com', 'you@yourcompany.com', 'passwd')

# If using an API token, you can create connection object using
# zendesk = Zendesk('https://yourcompany.zendesk.com', 'you@yourcompany.com', 'token', True)
# True specifies that the token is being used instead of the password

# See the zdeskcfg module for more sophisticated configuration at
# the command line and via a configuration file.
# https://github.com/fprimex/zdeskcfg

################################################################
## TICKETS
################################################################

# List
zendesk.tickets_list()

# Create
new_ticket = {
    'ticket': {
        'requester': {
            'name': 'Howard Schultz',
            'email': 'howard@starbucks.com',
        },
        'subject':'My Starbucks coffee is cold!',
        'description': 'please reheat my coffee',
        'tags': ['coffee', 'drinks'],
        'ticket_field_entries': [
            {
                'ticket_field_id': 1,
                'value': 'venti'
            },
            {
                'ticket_field_id': 2,
                'value': '$10'
            }
        ]
    }
}
# Create the ticket and get its URL
result = zendesk.ticket_create(data=new_ticket)

# Need ticket ID?
from zdesk import get_id_from_url
ticket_id = get_id_from_url(result)

# Show
zendesk.ticket_show(id=ticket_id)

# Delete
zendesk.ticket_delete(id=ticket_id)

See the full example file on github, however this is not anywhere close to covering all of the over 400 REST API methods.