Overview
SDSS Access provides a convenient and efficient way of navigating local and remote filesystem paths from the Science Archive Server (SAS). sdss_access uses the SDSS Tree product for all path look-ups. Each file species included in the tree product corresponds to an abstract SAS path, defined in the first data release that included that file species and inherited in future data releases. The abstract paths contain keywords which allow the sdss-access package to download specific files, with bulk downloads supported by allowing the user to append a list of file species keywords, including wildcard support.
Install
sdss_access is pip installable:
pip install sdss-accessFull documentation is hosted on Read The Docs. The source code is managed on GitHub.
Downloading Files
sdss_access provides Python utilities for downloading files from the SAS, including http requests using Python urllib, and utilities that wrap rsync (for the most efficient, multistream downloads) and curl. Examples and more details can be found on the official documentation.
Note that sdss_access organizes data in a local version of the SAS; if the SAS_BASE_DIR environment variable is not specified sas/ will be created in your home directory.
Accessing Public Data
sdss_access easily downloads public data with no additional configuration.
Accessing Proprietary Data
sdss_access can be configured to access proprietary data for members of the SDSS colloboration. See the documentation for details.