Installing Synapse API Clients

API clients provide a way to use Synapse programmatically. This page shows you how to install a client and login to Synapse programmatically. Packages to interface and access data within Synapse are available for:

Command line
Python
R

To manage stored login credentials, see Client Configuration.

Command Line

The Synapse command line client is implemented in Python and comes with the Synapse Python package. To install the Synapse command line client, make sure that you have Python and pip installed. For more information, see the Python and pip installation instructions.

After installing Python and pip, open your terminal (Mac OS or GNU/Linux) or Command Prompt (Windows), and run the following command:

PY

pip install synapseclient

synapse login "username" "password"
synapse -h

For more documentation on the command line client, see the synapseclient docs.

Python

The synapseclient package is available to use Python to access Synapse. See the Python client docs for supported versions of Python.

PY

pip install synapseclient

For complete documentation of the Python client, visit the synapseclient docs.

R

The synapser package is available for R versions 4.1 and above.

R

install.packages("synapser", repos=c("http://ran.synapse.org", "https://cloud.r-project.org"))
install.packages("synapser")

library(synapser)
synLogin("username", "password")

For more documentation on the R client, see synapser R docs.

To Report an Issue

Report client-specific issues or bugs at the R client or Python (including the command line client) issues pages. If you have questions on how to use the clients to interact with Synapse, visit the Synapse Help Forum.