Descartes Labs Platform¶

The Descartes Labs Platform simplifies analysis of global-scale raster data by providing:

Access to a catalog of petabytes of disparate geospatial data, all normalized and interoperable through one common interface

A Python client library to access these systems

Create an Account¶

This is a publicly installable package. However, if you want access to our full Platform and data catalog, you will need to create a Descartes Labs account and request access:

Sign up at https://iam.descarteslabs.com/

Send an email to your contact at Descartes Labs or visit our support portal to request access

Install the Python Client¶

If you plan to interact with the Platform programmatically, you should install the Python client and run a quick test to make sure everything’s working.

Take a look at our best practices for managing your development environment

Install the Python client

Authenticate with the Platform and test the connection

Familiarize yourself with our Python client

Note

As of version 2.0, the legacy GCP platform and its services are no longer supported. This documentation is for the AWS platform only.

At a minimum, we support the three most recent minor versions of the client. Each minor version is supported for up to a year. Currently the supported releases are:

2.1 (Oct 4, 2023)
2.0 (June 12, 2023)
1.12.1 (Feb 06, 2023)

We only support the latest patch release (e.g. 2.1.X) for any minor version.

We recommend that all users upgrade to version 2.1 as soon as possible. It contains many bug fixes and performance improvements, and is the only version that will receive new features and bug fixes going forward.

How to Use These Docs¶

Our docs are broken up into several sections, in increasing level of detail:

Examples demonstrate smaller pieces of functionality and are geared toward composability. We’re always adding to these examples, so let us know if there’s a topic you would like to see.
Guides contain best practices and contain more context than Examples.
Our API reference is there when you need to dig in to usage subtleties.

Support¶

Feel free to contact our Support Team at any time through our support portal

Status Page¶

If you are having intermittent issues with software functionality, check the Platform Status Page for the real-time status of known issues impacting Platform performance.