Simple Python Interface to Facility-Specific Infrastructure

The particle accelerators hosted at the Institute for Beam Physics and Technology (IBPT) represent a complex infrastructure with a live control system interface, a data archive, measurement routines and storage and management of metadata, among other aspects. The ’IBPT Python tools’ were created to provide a unified interface to all aspects of the accelerator infrastructure for both short-term student projects and basic accelerator operations. Instead of creating another custom framework, these sets of tools focus on bridging the gap between well established libraries and our facility and accelerator specific needs. External and accelerator specific libraries are glued together to provide an interface in order to minimize the technical knowledge of the accelerator infrastructure needed by the end user. Well established software engineering workflows of continuous integration were implemented to provide automatic testing, packaging, API documentation and release management. This paper discusses the general motivation and approach taken to create and maintain such a set of Python modules.