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🤔 Frequently Asked Questions

Below is a list of common questions and issues you may encounter. If you have suggestions, please join the FAQ Suggestions discussion on the GitHub repository!

How do I upgrade to the latest version?

You can install the latest version of Meerschaum with pip install --upgrade meerschaum or the command mrsm upgrade mrsm, which installs the latest version from PyPI and pulls the latest Docker images.

mrsm doesn't work!

You can invoke mrsm directly with python -m meerschaum. Check that your PATH includes scripts installed by pip, such as ~/.local/bin.

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export PATH=$PATH:~/.local/bin
How do I turn off the emoji and/or colors?

The color and emoji configuration settings are contained in the system config file under the formatting section, which you can access with edit config system.

Alternatively, you can install the color plugin which will toggle these values for you. The color command will toggle unicode and ansi settings by default, or you can specify color unicode or color ansi if you want to toggle specific values. 

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install plugins color
color
Note that disabling ANSI may not completely elimate ANSI characters.

Can I use Meerschaum in my scripts?

Yes, although some commands like bootstrap and edit are interactive and not safe for scripting, most commands are scriptable.

When executing Meerschaum actions in a script, it's a good idea to add --nopretty and --noask flags, or --yes or --force to agree to confirmation dialogues.

The flag --noask will choose the default values for questions (e.g. skipping deleting to prevent data loss) and --yes of --force will choose yes to agree to all dialogues.

The --nopretty flag may not have 100% coverage, but in cases like show pipes or show columns, it will instead print JSON representations of the pipes and data (separated by newlines) rather than formatting them.

If you are planning on integrating Meerschaum into your Python scripts, you can access actions directly via the meerschaum.actions.actions dictionary. Please consult the Python package documentation for more information. Also, you might want to consider making your script into a Meerschaum action by writing an action plugin.

Connectors don't work for <database flavor>!

Connectors use sqlalchemy Engines under the hood, and here is the list of supported database flavors (e.g. mssql, mysql, oracle, postgresql, sqlite, duckdb, citus, cockroachdb, mariadb, timescaledb). If your database flavor isn't listed, you might be able to use a supported flavor that shares a driver (e.g. postgresql is a commonly shared flavor).

In cases like Microsoft SQL server or Oracle SQL, make sure you have the appropriate drivers installed. Here is a utility script I wrote to automatically install Microsoft and Oracle drivers (currently supports Ubuntu / Debian and Fedora / CentOS / RHEL):

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curl -sf -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bmeares/Meerschaum/main/scripts/drivers.sh -o drivers.sh
chmod +x drivers.sh
sudo ./drivers.sh

Here are the driver links if you want to manually install them:

Additionally, for Meerschaum to install pyodbc, you may need g++ and gcc installed:

How do I completely uninstall Meerschaum?
  • Take down your stack and delete its data with mrsm stack down -v.
    • You might also want to delete bmeares/meerschaum and other images with docker image rm.
  • Uninstall via pip: pip uninstall meerschaum.
  • Delete the folder ~/.config/meerschaum/ (%APPDATA%\Meerschaum\ on Windows).