Skip to content

Quickstart

In a nutshell: There is a self-documenting command-line tool qlever, which is controlled by a single configuration file, called Qleverfile. For most applications, the qlever command-line tool is all you need to use QLever. See here for a complete reference of all the possible settings in a Qleverfile.

Installation

# inside a virtual environment
pip install qlever

pipx install qlever

uv tool install --upgrade qlever

Usage

# inside a virtual environment
qlever setup-config olympics # Get Qleverfile (config file) for this dataset
qlever get-data              # Download the dataset
qlever index                 # Build index data structures for this dataset
qlever start                 # Start a QLever server using that index
qlever query                 # optional: Launch an example query
qlever ui                    # optional: Launch the QLever UI

qlever setup-config olympics # Get Qleverfile (config file) for this dataset
qlever get-data              # Download the dataset
qlever index                 # Build index data structures for this dataset
qlever start                 # Start a QLever server using that index
qlever query                 # optional: Launch an example query
qlever ui                    # optional: Launch the QLever UI

uvx qlever setup-config olympics # Get Qleverfile (config file) for this dataset
uvx qlever get-data              # Download the dataset
uvx qlever index                 # Build index data structures for this dataset
uvx qlever start                 # Start a QLever server using that index
uvx qlever query                 # optional: Launch an example query
uvx qlever ui                    # optional: Launch the QLever UI

This will create a SPARQL endpoint for the 120 Years of Olympics dataset. It is a great dataset for getting started because it is small, but not trivial (around 2 million triples), and the downloading and indexing should only take a few seconds.

Each command will also show you the command line it uses. That way you can learn, on the side, how QLever works internally. If you just want to know the command line for a particular command, without executing it, you can append --show like this:

qlever index --show

There are many more commands and options, see qlever --help for general help, qlever <command> --help for help on a specific command, or just use the autocompletion.

Code and further documentation

The code for the qlever command-line tool can be found at https://github.com/qlever-dev/qlever-control. There you also find more information on the usage on macOS and Windows, for usage with your own dataset, and for developers.