TabPy is an open-source Python web server which is used for extending Tableau calculations or Data Prep data processing with Python scripts. You can read more about how to use TabPy with Tableau on Using Python in Tableau Calculations page or on Tableau blog Building advanced analytics applications with TabPy, or even with Building Data Science Applications with TabPy Video Tutorial.
When you just start using TabPy and search for information on how to install, configure and use it you may find a lot of articles and blog posts that are somewhat contradictory to each other and outdated. And you will find people explaining how to install and use TabPy, deploy models to it and use its other features mentioning tabpy, tabpy_server, tabpy_tools and maybe even some other buzzwords. So what are those and what are the actual steps?
First, let me tell you the most recent and updated steps for how to install TabPy can be found on the project GitHub page TabPy Installation Instructions. As you can see on the page installing TabPy as simple as running this one command: pip install tabpy. With the command, you now have the latest approved TabPy package installed in your Python environment. And to run it simply execute tabpy command.
Now, what are those tabpy_server and tabpy_client you may find mentions about? Those are old versions of TabPy when it was split into 2 packages. Neither of those is recommended to be used anymore. And if you have them installed you should delete them.
To give you more information long ago before TabPy became a package it was built as an application (tabpy_server) and a library (tabpy_client) which were distributed as source code via GitHub. But those days gone and you don’t need to clone GitHub repository, configure your environment variables, run setup/startup scripts and perform other black magic steps anymore.
Summary: you only need tabpy package, ignore all the posts and articles where tabpy_server and/or tabpy_tools are mentioned as obsolete.
