How to use GIMP inside a Python script?

Question

GIMP enables you to make plugin in in Python, what I would like to do is to call GIMP function like I would do inside one of this plugin but this return the following error since GIMP doesn't find any running GIMP Core to use.

LibGimpBase-ERROR **: gimp_wire_write_msg: the wire protocol has not been initialized aborting...

I would like to know if it's possible ? And if yes, how ?

Thanks

Answer 1

GIMP's Python extensions need to be run from inside a GIMP instance. If you want to use GIMPś API from Python you have to run a GIMP without a graphical UI (passing the -i parameter from the command line) and running a custom call to the api - with the -b command line parameter - so, you can run your python_fu_do_it program, from the command line calling:

gimp -i -b \(python-fu-do-it \)

Note that this is the only way to get gimp-python extensions running: you have to run it from inside a GIMP process.

In real life, a useful thing to do might be to make your gimp-plugin expose some functions that perform actions on images that you want, and export those through an xmlrpc or jsonrpc server - which is easily done in Python. You then start this "image server" using the method above, and create stand-alone python script which call your gimp-using functions through xmlrpc.