ABOUT python-hipchat is a Python interfacet to the HipChat JSON api. It wraps the various routes supported by the API in Python classes, though the mapping isn't perfect. It is also a work in progress. Through python, it also exposes command line utilities that will dump either json output to stdout or print human readable results as a poor mans FFI into other languages, such as Perl. INSTALLATION is pretty easy. At the command line as root: # python setup.py install DEVELOPMENT is also pretty easy, either using your virtualenv or as root, run the following: $ python setup.py development This will create shortcuts to the various command line utilities and expose the hipchat top level module for testing and integration into other projects. EXAMPLES The full documentation of the HipChat API can be found here: https://www.hipchat.com/docs/api The following examples show how the python interface maps to the published API. The first step is to initialise the config with the appropriate hipchat token. This is stored in an ini style file, handled by ConfigObj In [12]: import hipchat.config In [13]: hipchat.config.init_cfg('hipchat.cfg') In [17]: hipchat.config.token Out[17]: 'fa28d24b4ee537f0ffa51d545a9bf7' In [18]: cat 'hipchat.cfg' token = fa28d24b4ee537f0ffa51d545a9bf7 proxy_server = proxy.example.org proxy_type = http No worries though, by the time you see this, i'll have revoked this token. Then we can perform actions on rooms: In [19]: Room.list() Out[19]: [<hipchat.room.Room object at 0x2e5c990>, <hipchat.room.Room object at 0x2e78d50>, <hipchat.room.Room object at 0x2e78d90>, <hipchat.room.Room object at 0x2e78dd0>] In [22]: map(str, Room.list()) Out[22]: ['{"room": {"topic": "Discuss open Hackathon projects and request QA testing", "owner_user_id": 5257, "room_id": 13010, "name": "2011 Hackathon!", "last_active": 1303918853}}', '{"room": {"topic": "", "owner_user_id": 5237, "room_id": 3721, "name": "All Testers (only)", "last_active": 1304534734}}', '{"room": {"topic": "or is it Testing all things?", "owner_user_id": 5237, "room_id": 2444, "name": "All Things Testing", "last_active": 1303239018}}', '{"room": {"topic": "Analytics", "owner_user_id": 2038, "room_id": 14208, "name": "Analytics", "last_active": 1299629441}}'] In [23]: map(dir, Room.list()) Out[23]: [['__class__', '__delattr__', '__dict__', '__doc__', '__format__', '__getattribute__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__module__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__setattr__', '__sizeof__', '__str__', '__subclasshook__', '__weakref__', 'history', 'jsono', 'last_active', 'list', 'message', 'name', 'owner_user_id', 'room_id', 'show', 'sort', 'topic'], *SNIP* ] So you can see that the various properties are preserved. Still, type safety isn't a true guarantee, since list and show return different results. In [5]: str(Room.show(room_id=13010)) Out[5]: '{"room": {"name": "2011 Hackathon!", "last_active": 1303918853, "created": 1297912387, "topic": "Discuss open Hackathon projects and request QA testing", "participants": [], "room_id": 13010, "owner_user_id": 5257}}' Sometimes we need to wrap around the silly notion of reserved keywords (like we care about making compiler authors' lives easy...) In [6]: x = {'room_id': 13010, 'from': 'Python', 'message': 'Python Rocks'} In [7]: Room.message(**x) Out[7]: <hipchat.room.MessageSentStatus object at 0x31ec690> In [8]: str(Room.message(**x)) Out[8]: '{"status": "sent"}' COMMAND LINE There are a bunch of command line tools to wrap the python, and they will all return appropriate error codes or dump json to stdout. They are prefixed with hipchat, so tab completion is your friend. If your shell does not offer this functionality, then read the fine source code to discover all the tools. The commands are as follows: hipchat-add-user hipchat-del-user hipchat-disable-user hipchat-enable-user hipchat-list-users hipchat-set-user-admin hipchat-set-user-name hipchat-set-user-password hipchat-set-user-timezone hipchat-set-user-title hipchat-show-user hipchat-update-user hipchat-undel-user Run them with no parameters to find out what they do PROXY We can use a proxy server in case your command and control server is behind some firewall. As seen above, just set the appropriate settings in hipchat.cfg