.. index:: cffi; python
.. _cffi:

cffi
====

Description
-----------

cffi is a Foreign Function Interface for Python which enables C code to be called easily from Python code.

(Note that calling Fortran from Python is also very straightforward by using Fortran 2003 C bindings.)

User instructions
-----------------

An old version of cffi is installed on all machines.  Newer versions are available via the modules system.  To add it to your environment run:

.. code-block:: bash

    $ module load cffi/1.10.0

Documentation and examples can be found at http://cffi.readthedocs.org/.

The cffi module also includes pycparser, a python module for parsing C code
(which is unlikely to be of direct use).

Source
------

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/cffi

License
-------

MIT

Admin notes
-----------

cffi is already installed as other packages we need depend upon it, as is its dependency pycparser.  After installing libffi-dev from the Debian repository, the latest version can easily be installed for both python2 and python3 using:

... code-block bash::

    PYTHONUSERBASE=/common/debian/9.1/PythonPackages/python/2.7/cffi/cffi-1.10.0 pip install --upgrade cffi
    PYTHONUSERBASE=/common/debian/9.1/PythonPackages/python/3.5/cffi/cffi-1.10.0 pip3 install --upgrade cffi