README.md

freshdesk-api-weave

A tool for interacting with the Freshdesk API to get and store Weave support data in a MySQL database

Description

auto_update_mysql.py

Inserts data from Freshdesk into a MySQL database.

schema.sql

Can be used to create a MySQL database that is appropriately formatted to be used with auto_update_mysql.py, with the table and column names referenced in that file.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

To get data from Freshdesk you will need a valid Freshdesk API key and password, and you will need to know your organization's Freshdesk domain. To use auto_update_mysql.py you will also need to have MySQL installed. These tools all use the Python Requests library and auto_update_mysql.py uses the PyMySQL library. (I recommend installing the package manager Homebrew if you haven't already and then using Homebrew to install the latest version of Python. You can find a walkthrough of this process here.)

To install MySQL using Homebrew:

brew install mysql

To install Requests and PyMySQL using pip3:

pip3 install requests
pip3 install pymysql

Usage

First, you will need to edit config.py and add your Freshdesk API key, password, and domain. You will also need to specify the first date for which you would like to retrieve ticket data. (You don't need to worry about duplicating ticket data, since the database created by schema.sql will automatically update existing tickets instead of creating duplicates.)

Creating the Freshdesk database in MySQL

You will also need to create a MySQL database named Freshdesk that is structured appropriately. You can easily do this using the included file schema.sql.

mysql -u USERNAME -p < schema.sql

Just replace USERNAME with your MySQL username, and remember that depending on your current directory, you may need to specify the full path of schema.sql.

Using auto_update_mysql.py

After creating the Freshdesk MySQL database, you will need to edit config.py to include your MySQL credentials. (If you used schema.sql, you can set database = "Freshdesk". Also if you are running MySQL locally, then set host = "localhost".)

Running auto_update_mysql.py and manual_update_mysql.py will update the lists of tickets, companies, and contacts, adding any that are not already in the database.