Launchpad (LP) is well known to most people involved with Ubuntu development, because it's the main place for almost all Ubuntu core involvement. It's a very popular web service for driving and maintaining software projects – both open and closed source. It offers bug-tracking functionality, version control through Bazaar (bzr) or Git, translations, Debian package builders, private package archives, and many other features useful when working in a distributed environment. But, it's not just a useful tool for web users; Launchpad also offers a very rich API allowing scripts to access the same functionality available for humans through the web browser: the Launchpad API. In this article, I will concentrate on the most popular and convenient bindings: the Python launchpadlib .

Quick Setup

Ubuntu currently ships two separate Python bindings for Launchpad: one for Python 2.x and one for Python 3.x. In all the examples here, I will use the latter, as there is no real reason not to switch to 3.x whenever it's possible. To get all the required bits in place, you need to install the python3-launchpadlib (or python-launchpadlib for 2.x) package along with all its dependencies [1].

sudo apt-get install python3-launchpadlib

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