I just start to learn QIIME2 this week and tried to follow the tutorials on the official website. These tutorials are very comprehensive and helpful, I do appreciate it. However, it seems all of them are written in the command-line interface, and I can hardly find some examples/tutorials illustrating how to program in Python by Artifact API throughout the website.
I have no experience using the terminal, but I do learn some Python before, so I was wondering are there any good resources of using QIIME2 in Artifact API?
Hi @hulfred,
Thanks for posting! We plan to provide more artifact API tutorials in the future, including expanding all existing command-line interface tutorials to cover the equivalent commands in artifact API. For now, this tutorial gives a primer on artifact API and should give some sense of the equivalent artifact API command for various actions. Furthermore, artifact API documentation exists for all available plugins (just click on the action of interest and click the artifact API tab ). So that should help you get started using artifact API.
All that said, the command-line interface is the easiest way for users to get started who want to use QIIME2 for analysis. Learning unix/linux commands is not even necessary to get started, though learning the basics on navigating directory structure would help.
Quick followup on @Nicholas_Bokulich's reply: I wrote up a forum post showing how to use the Artifact API to load and view Artifacts as Metadata (e.g. to accomplish what the CLI is doing in this section of the metadata tutorial). There's also some other tidbits about the Artifact API in that post that are not included in the main (and currently incomplete) Artifact API tutorial, so the post may be helpful to you: