---
id: surge-api
version: "1.5.24"
license: MIT
license_treatment: permissive
maintenance: active
---

# surge-api — Surge Python SDK

License: permissive · Maintenance: active · Downloads: 1.4M/mo

## What it is and what it does

Surge-api is a Python client library for the Surge crowdsourcing platform, enabling programmatic access to data labeling workflows. It wraps the Surge REST API and provides object-oriented interfaces for managing projects (creating, listing, retrieving), uploading task data from CSV files or Python dictionaries, and downloading annotated results in multiple formats. The library handles authentication via API key (set directly or via environment variable) and abstracts away HTTP details through requests.

Typical workflows include retrieving existing projects and their results, creating new labeling projects from templates (blueprints), bulk-uploading task data, and exporting completed annotations. The SDK depends on standard HTTP and utility libraries (requests, python-dateutil, six) and includes pytest for its own test suite. It targets Python 3.10+ and is maintained by Surge AI.

Use it for:

- Retrieve completed labeling results from a Surge project and export them to CSV or JSON for downstream analysis
- Programmatically create a new labeling project from a blueprint and bulk-upload task data from a CSV file
- Automate task creation and project management as part of a data pipeline for iterative annotation workflows
- Query individual tasks and their fields to integrate Surge labeling into a larger application
- Set up scheduled jobs to download and process annotation results without manual dashboard interaction

## Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts above — verify before relying.

A Python SDK for accessing the Surge API to manage data labeling projects, create and retrieve tasks, and download annotated results.

Yes. The package is actively maintained, has no known vulnerabilities, uses a permissive MIT license, and provides a straightforward Python interface to Surge's labeling API. Install it if you need to programmatically manage Surge projects and tasks; the low install friction and recent activity make it a low-risk choice. Requires Python 3.10+.

## Install

pip install surge-api
uv add surge-api
poetry add surge-api

## Installing surge-api

Before you install: Low install friction with a pure-Python wheel distribution. Actively maintained with a recent release (78 days ago) and ongoing repository activity. Requires Python 3.10 or later.

License in practice: MIT license permits free use, modification, and distribution with minimal restrictions, making it suitable for both open-source and commercial projects.

Quickstart:

pip install surge-api

import surge
surge.api_key = "YOUR_API_KEY"

projects = surge.Project.list()
project = surge.Project.retrieve("project-id")
results = project.download_json()

Requires Python 3.10 or later; Surge API key must be set before making requests.

Verify before relying:

- Whether the SDK handles rate limiting or retry logic for API calls
- Support for async/await patterns or only synchronous API calls
- Whether CSV parsing handles edge cases like quoted fields or special characters
- API stability guarantees or backward compatibility policy across versions

## Package facts

- License: MIT (permissive)
- Python support: supports_current
- Install friction: low
- Maintenance: active
- Downloads: 1.4M/month (top 5,000 on PyPI)
- Known vulnerabilities: none known

## Tags

surge api python client, data labeling sdk, crowdsourcing api wrapper, task management python, annotation project api, surge.ai python library, batch labeling tasks, crowdsourcing, data-annotation, api-client

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