Introducing the ArcREST module

The ArcREST package is a Python wrapper for the ArcGIS REST API. Before ArcREST, GIS Python developers working with the ArcGIS web infrastructure had to write multiple functions and many lines of code to administer the sites and web services related to that specific infrastructure. Now, with ArcREST, this has made developing with Python and the ArcGIS REST API much easier. You can find the ArcREST Python package, which was developed by ESRI, on GitHub at https://github.com/Esri/ArcREST.

Note

It is important to note that ESRI does not officially provide technical support for ArcREST.

Because ArcREST is not provided as a part of the typical ArcGIS installation like ArcPy, we will have to install this ourselves.

Installing ArcREST

There are two ways in which you can install the ArcREST Python package. The recommended method of installation is to use the pip method, which was covered earlier in the book. To install, we can just use the pip command pip install arcrest_package...