How to Query The Graph Protocol for On-Chain Data using Python

A step-by-step guide on querying on-chain data from Subgraphs using Python, GraphQL, and Subgrounds.

In this tutorial, we will query the ENS Subgraph using two methods; raw GraphQL query and Subgrounds library by Playgrounds.

The goal is for you to be able to:

• query any Subgraph data using python
• understand the two querying methods; using raw GraphQL and Subgrounds library

Getting Started

Requirements: To successfully follow this tutorial, you will need Python 3.10 and Anaconda installed on your system.

Once you have installed Python and Anaconda, open your command line and clone this repo:

git clone https://github.com/tonykipkemboi/ENS_subgraph_data

Change directory into the folder:

cd ENS_subgraph_data

Create a python virtual environment to keep your project dependencies isolated:

python -m venv env

Activate the virtual environment (env); you should see the name of the environment prefixed after successful activation(env) C:\ on Windows machine:

.\env\Script\activate

Now that we have our environment up and ready, let’s install some libraries that our project will depend on for querying data:

pip install -r requirements.txt

To confirm you have the needed packages, use pip to check:

python -m pip freeze

Since we will be using the virtual environment in Jupyter Notebook, we need to add it as such;

• install ipykernel package which provides IPython kernel for Jupyter:

pip install --user ipykernel

• add virtual environment to Jupyter by typing:

python -m ipykernel install --name=env

• After running the command above, you should see something like this:

  Installed kernelspec env in C:\ProgramData\jupyter\kernels\env

Final step of the setup is to open Jupyter Notebook :

jupyter notebook

A tab will open in your browser with Jupyter on localhost. Locate the “New” tab and choose env from menu selection to open a notebook with the virtual environment we just created.

Now we are ready to roll!