[ckan-dev] Notes on installing from source

Thu May 17 11:17:04 UTC 2012

I installed CKAN yesterday afternoon from source, using the instructions at

http://docs.ckan.org/en/ckan-1.7/install-from-source.html

Most things worked pretty smoothly and, luckily, when they didn't I
was lucky enough to have David Raznick on hand to help sort them out.
As a result I've made the following notes on where the doc could be
improved.

For some ghastly reason I am running Linux Mint, which is some variant
of Ubuntu. It's not 10.04, so no package, hence the source install.

Sec 2: Not wanting a mysterious file called 'pyenv' in my home
directory, I created a directory ~/ckan and typed 'virtualenv pyenv'
from there. Everything worked fine. But if I had needed the 'tip' it
would have been a little confusing. It would also be worth reminding
the user that the dubious package is one they've supposedly just
installed, so if that went OK, they won't need to worry about this.

The tip also isn't clear about under what circumstances I'd need to do
the 'easy_install pip' - I didn't need to (is that also only when
python-virtualenv is missing?)

Sec 4: This worked, but the example command for installing a
particular version is confusing. It says it is for 1.5.1, but
replacing '1.5.1' with '1.7' fails because there is a rogue 'c' in the
command.

Probably it would be better to use the latest version (1.7) as the
example anyway. Or is there a way of asking for the latest released
version?

I understand this checks out the whole Git repository with all history
- I can't imagine why I'd need to do this to build a particular
version. But David assures me it's very sensible.

Sec 6: This worked, but it wasn't very clear what the purpose of the
'List existing databases' step was.

Sec 8: So now I had to try to get Solr working using the instructions at

http://docs.ckan.org/en/ckan-1.7/solr-setup.html

This didn't work at all, in ways I can't now remember, to do with
Java. In the end David suggested using Tomcat rather than Jetty (don't
ask me what these do, but they have something to do with getting Solr
to work ...) and this turned out to be much more straightforward to
install and get working, with two caveats (below). David suggested
maybe Tomcat should be the default suggested in this doc.

- One problem with Jetty was to do with using the wrong version of
Java, which seemed to be fixed using "sudo update-alternatives
--config java". It didn't fix Jetty - not sure if it would also have
been needed with Tomcat.
- Soft linking the schema file didn't work - it seems Tomcat doesn't
like soft links. We made a copy.

After this everything worked, and I now have my very own CKAN. Hurrah!

Mark

-- 
Mark Wainwright, CKAN Community Co-ordinator
Open Knowledge Foundation http://okfn.org/
Skype: m.wainwright