Colectica Portal is widely used to disseminate DDI-LIfecycle metadata. It acts as a website which sits on top of Colectica Repository and provides access to item level metadata through display as web pages and as downloads in a number of formats. The API is documented in the swagger documentation that is supplied with Colectica Portal, but for those unfamiliar with either API programming or DDI-Lifecycle, using the API can be a significant barrier. The colectica-api wrapper allows a user with little experience of using APIs or DDI-Lifecycle a straight-forward entry point to those with python programming experience to access and discovery DDI-LIfecycle metadata. The colectica-api wrapper is open sourced and available as a pip install package for ease of use, and provides example code to get a python developer up and running. The wrapper takes advantage of the introduction of JSON format in the recent versions of Colectica which is preferred over the previous XML format.