Installing the Openblock Software

These steps assume you have fulfilled the requirements and followed the instructions in the section Preparing Your System.

(You can skip this if you are cloning an OpenBlock AMI.)

Creating a virtualenv

Create a "virtualenv" that will contain the OpenBlock software and its python dependencies. (You probably do not want to do this as root or with sudo):

$ virtualenv openblock
$ cd openblock

"Activate" your virtualenv - this makes sure that all python commands will use your new virtual environment:

$ source bin/activate

Activating also sets the $VIRTUAL_ENV environment variable, which we can use as a convenient base to be sure that we run commands in the right directory.

We'll be using pip to install some software, so make sure it's installed. Recent versions of virtualenv do this for you, but virtualenv < 1.4.1 does not, so we need to make sure. We also recommend that you ensure that the latest versions of pip and distribute are installed:

$ easy_install --upgrade pip distribute
$ hash -r

Note that it's very important that pip is installed in the virtualenv. If you only have pip installed globally on your system, it won't work and you will get confusing build errors such as version conflicts, permission failures, etc.

Installing OpenBlock Packages

You can install either stable releases of the OpenBlock software, or check out the latest development code.

Installing Stable Packages

The latest stable releases of ebpub, ebdata, and obadmin can be found on the Python Package Index. To install from these packages, we will publish a consolidated pip requirements file that will install all the necessary python packages. These requirements files will be listed for each release at http://openplans.github.com/openblock/ .

For example, the 1.1 release is at: http://openplans.github.com/openblock/requirements/openblock-requirements-1.1.0.txt and can be installed with this command:

$ $VIRTUAL_ENV/bin/pip install -r http://openplans.github.com/openblock/requirements/openblock-requirements-1.1.0.txt

If you encounter errors during package installation, please see Common Installation Problems.

Installing Development Code

Download the openblock software:

$ cd $VIRTUAL_ENV
$ mkdir -p src/
$ git clone git://github.com/openplans/openblock.git src/openblock

It takes a few more Pip commands to install for development, like so commands:

$ cd $VIRTUAL_ENV/src/openblock
$ pip install -r ebpub/requirements.txt
$ pip install -e ebpub
$ pip install -r ebdata/requirements.txt
$ pip install -e ebdata
$ pip install -r obadmin/requirements.txt
$ pip install -e obadmin

If you encounter errors during package installation, please see Common Installation Problems.

Next Steps: Install the Demo, or Create a Custom App

If you want to run the OpenBlock demo app (just like http://demo.openblockproject.org), proceed with Step-By-Step Demo Installation.

Or, you can dive right in to Creating a Custom Site Based on OpenBlock.