Welcome back to the Tableau SDK Series. In this post, you will learn how to install Tableau SDK (Python) on your system and have this running. Follow along

Prerequisites

Please make sure you complete this little checklist before you follow me along the tutorial

Tableau SDK is cross-platform and runs on Windows, Mac OS X or Linux. You need to do the setup on any of these three platforms.
Python 2.6 or 2.7 installed and running. If you have Python 3 on your system, you will need to install Python 2.7 on your system. If you do not have Python at all, you will need to install Python. I am not going to cover how to install Python since there are tons of tutorial out there on how to do that. Once you have Python installed and running, come back to this section.
If you're on Windows, you must have Visual C++ runtime library installed. In case you don't have, download it from Microsoft's website https://www.microsoft.com/en-US/download/details.aspx?id=40784
And finally, if you're installing on a Mac, you must use the 64-bit installer.

Installation on Windows

Download and extract Tableau SDK Python package from Tableau website using following links

Alternatively, this is the official Tableau page where links to these packages are provided.

The downloaded packaged file will a zip file. Extract the downloaded folder in any location and go inside the extracted folder. You must see a filder named 'tableausdk'

tableausdk folder within extracted packaged zip (Windows)

Copy the folder named tableausdk
Go to the folder site-packages in Python installation (C:/python27/Lib/site-packages)
Paste
Done!

Note: Python can be in other locations also other than where I mentioned in above example depending upon where you installed it on your Windows

To test if everything went well, go to command prompt and type python to run python. And run the following command in python terminal to import tableausdk package

import tableausdk

You must not see any error. Voila!

Installation on Mac or Linux

Download and extract Tableau SDK Python package from Tableau website using following links

Alternatively, this is the official Tableau page where links to this package are provided.

I am assuming the tar.gz file was downloaded in downloads folder. Open the terminal and run following command to install the downloaded file.

pip install ./downloads/Tableau-SDK-Python-OSX-64Bit-10-1-1.tar.gz

Please change ./downloads or the package file name with exact file name that you downloaded.

If you face any error with pip install, please follow manual installation steps in this amazing Youtube video on how to install python package using tar.gz files. If there are still any challenges, you can start a conversation below.

Next Steps

Congratulations! You just installed tableausdk Python package on your system and must be very excited to create something using the package. In the subsequent posts, I will explain you functions in tableausdk and how do they work and will help you create your own Tableau Extract file. Ciao!

keep learning