Local development installation

System setup

To hack on Arkestrator, you will need some basic components installed on your system:

• A recent Python (we recommend 2.7)
• Virtualenv
• Pip
• A relational database supported by Django

On a Debian Wheezy system, for example, you should be able to get these things by running:

apt-get install python2.7 python-pip python-virtualenv python-dev

You will also need a database. SQLite 3 might still work, so perhaps you can get away with:

apt-get install sqlite3

We all use PostgreSQL because it is awesome. If you want to use PostgreSQL, in addition to the server and the client libraries, you'll need the development headers so that you can build Pyscopg2 inside your virtualenv later on:

apt-get install postgresql postgresql-server-dev-9.1

At this point, you should have all of the prerequisites for building a local Arkestrator environment.

Virtualenv setup

On Github, you should fork the main Arkestrator repository. Visit https://github.com/adreyer/arkestrator and click the "fork" button. If you want to work on BBKing, you should visit https://github.com/adreyer/BBKing and fork that too.

Next, create a virtualenv and activate it.

cd ~/virtualenvs
virtualenv ark
cd ark
source bin/activate

We are going to install Arkestrator using Pip. We are using pip -e so that these repositories are editable. Substitute your own fork's URL here. You'll want to add adreyer's repo as your upstream remote, too:

pip install -e git+ssh://[email protected]/cmroddy/arkestrator.git#egg=mdc3
cd ~/virtualenvs/ark/src/mdc3/
git remote add upstream https://github.com/adreyer/arkestrator.git

If you want to work on BBKing, install that the same way:

pip install -e git+ssh://[email protected]/cmroddy/BBKing.git#egg=bbking
cd ~/virtualenvs/ark/src/bbking
git remote add upstream https://github.com/adreyer/BBKing.git

If you don't want to work on BBKing, you can just install it with the rest of the requirements. Regardless, you need to install them, so:

cd $path_to_arkestrator_clone
pip install -r requirements.txt

At this point, you should have all the Python code you need. Maybe Psycopg2 failed to build or something else failed to install, so make sure there are no errors in the output from Pip. If there are, fix the problem and try again.

Sync and migrate database

You will need to sync and migrate your database. If you're using SQLite, make sure that you keep track of where the local database file is. Your working directory actually matters. If you're using Postgres, make sure that you've created an appropriate user and database. You probably need to edit pg_hba.conf. Whatever, I am not going to tell you how to administer your database server.

To sync and migrate the database, run:

django-admin.py syncdb --migrate --settings=mdc3.settings

This should spew out a bunch of output about table creation, prompt you to create an admin account, and then spew out a bunch more output about schema migrations. If there are any problems, fix them.

Run the development server

If you made it this far, then everything should be working. Start the development server:

django-admin.py runserver --settings=mdc3.settings

Production installation

Production installation is possible.