Installation¶
This is a full walkthrough of how to get MediaCore running.
Experienced Pylons users can check out the Quick Installation Overview page for a (very) condensed version of the instructions.
This installation guide assumes a basic familiarity with a *nix shell. Experience with a Windows or DOS shell will translate pretty easily. You should be familiar with the concepts important to web development such as databases, web servers, and file permissions. You should be comfortable with running commands in a terminal, and the basics like cd, ls, mkdir, tar, sudo, etc. For a quick refresher check out this introduction to *nix command shells.
Step 0: Requirements¶
MediaCore runs on *nix operating systems. We’ve tested CentOS and Mac OS X, but any Linux or BSD based OS should work just fine.
If you run Windows and want to try MediaCore, you have two options:
- If you’re an experienced developer, try your hand at translating MediaCore and its installation process to a Windows environment. It’s probably not that different. We’d love to hear how you did it.
- Find a cheap web host that offers Apache, FastCGI, and SSH support, and install it on there.
You will need:
- Python 2.5.x or newer
- MySQL 5.0.x or newer
- GCC must be installed and available on your $PATH for certain required Python packages to install properly.
You may need (if you don’t have permissions to install new software on the server you’re using, you’ll also need to have the following packages installed):
If you do have permissions to install new software, we’ll cover the installation of setuptools and virtualenv in Step 0.2: Installing Setuptools and Step 0.3: Installing Virtualenv below.
Step 0.1.0: Requirements Installation on OS X¶
As mentioned above, you need to have GCC installed for some of MediaCore’s dependencies to be able to compile. For Mac OS X users, that means installing Xcode.
You can install Xcode from your OS X install CD, from the “Optional Installs” directory, or (if you have OSX 10.5.8 or 10.6) you can download it from the above link.
For the MySQL and Python requirements, we recommend using MacPorts. Mac OS X ships with a version of Python installed, but we find it is simpler and more reliable to have your own version installed in a separate place. Macports will (by default) install packages to /opt/local, keeping itself completely separate from any previously installed packages that OS X needs to function.
After you have Xcode installed, You can install MacPorts by downloading the dmg disk image from MacPorts install page and running the contained installer.
To install MySQL 5 and Python 2.5 once MacPorts is installed, open up a terminal (like Terminal.app or iTerm.app) and enter the following commands:
# By this point you should have Xcode and MacPorts installed...
# Make sure your MacPorts files are up to date
sudo port selfupdate
# Load the updated environment settings (make sure the installed MacPorts
# executables will be on your $PATH.)
source ~/.profile
# Install MySQL5 and Python2.5
sudo port install mysql5-server python25
# Initialize the newly installed MySQL server
sudo /opt/local/lib/mysql5/bin/mysql_install_db --user=mysql
# Start the MySQL Server and instruct it to start every time you reboot
sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.mysql5.plist
# NOTE: If you ever want to stop the MySQL Server, run the following command:
# sudo launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.mysql5.plist
# Put a link to mysql_config where other programs will expect to find it
sudo ln -s /opt/local/bin/mysql_config5 /opt/local/bin/mysql_config
# Put a link to mysql client for consistency in naming with other platforms
sudo ln -s /opt/local/bin/mysql5 /opt/local/bin/mysql
Step 0.1.1: Requirements Installation on Ubuntu 9.04¶
You’re in luck! GCC and mysql-server-5.0 are installed by default on Ubuntu 9.04. You’ll just have to install mysql-client and python2.5 (and their respective libraries). Then you can proceed with installing Setuptools and Virtualenv as below.
# install the mysql client and python2.5
sudo apt-get install mysql-client-5.1 libmysqlclient15off python2.5-dev python2.5-doc
# install the necessary libraries for creating thumbnails
sudo apt-get install libjpeg-dev libjpeg62 libjpeg62-dev zlib1g-dev libfreetype6 libfreetype6-dev
Step 0.2: Installing Setuptools¶
The Python setuptools package is what we’ll use to automate the rest of the installation of Python packages.
First, check that you have setuptools installed for Python2.5:
# Check if you have setuptools installed:
python2.5 -c 'import setuptools'
If you get no error, you can skip the rest of this step; setuptools is already installed!
If you get an error like the following, you’ll need to install setuptools first:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: No module named setuptools
If you’re using a system with a package manager and you know how to install setuptools 0.6c9 or higher for python2.5 using that package manager go ahead:
# For example, on Ubuntu 9.04
sudo apt-get install python-setuptools
# Or on Mac OS X (with MacPorts):
sudo port -v install py25-setuptools
Otherwise, download the setuptools installer and install manually:
# Download the Setuptools installer
wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/2.5/s/setuptools/setuptools-0.6c11-py2.5.egg
# Install setuptools
sudo sh setuptools-0.6c11-py2.5.egg
Step 0.3: Installing Virtualenv¶
First, check if you have virtualenv installed.
# Check if you have virtualenv installed:
python2.5 -c 'import virtualenv'
If you get no error, you can skip the rest of this step; virtualenv is already installed!
If you get an error like the following, you’ll need to install virtualenv.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: No module named virtualenv
If you’re using a system with a package manager and you know how to install setuptools 0.6c9 or higher for python2.5 using that package manager go ahead:
# For example, on Ubuntu 9.04, you must install python-virtualenv, then
# create a custom virtualenv-2.5 script to use with python2.5
sudo apt-get install python-virtualenv
sudo cp /usr/bin/virtualenv /usr/bin/virtualenv-2.5
sudo sh -c "sed 's:#\!/usr/bin/python$:#\!/usr/bin/python2.5:' /usr/bin/virtualenv > /usr/bin/virtualenv-2.5"
# Or on Mac OS X (with MacPorts):
sudo port -v install py25-virtualenv
Otherwise, install virtualenv via setuptools:
# Install virtualenv via setuptools.
sudo easy_install-2.5 virtualenv
Step 1: Setup a Python Virtual Environment¶
NOTE: Past this point, it will be assumed that all packages required in Step 0: Requirements are installed.
If you haven’t heard of them, Virtual Environments are a way to keep installations of multiple Python applications from interfering with each other.
This means you can install MediaCore and all of its dependencies without worrying about overwriting any existing versions of Python libraries.
The following command will create a folder named mediacore_env in the current directory you can put this folder anywhere, but remember where it is–we’ll need to point to it later.
# Create a new virtual environment:
virtualenv-2.5 --no-site-packages mediacore_env
# Now, activate that virtual environment:
source mediacore_env/bin/activate
Now that you’ve activated the newly created virtual environment, any packages you install will only be accessible when you’ve activated the environment.
NOTE: Any time you want to work with mediacore, you should thus activate the virtual environment as we just did in the line above.
Step 2: Install MediaCore¶
There are two main ways to get MediaCore:
For most users, you should download the latest official release of Mediacore from our site.
Once you’ve downloaded MediaCore, it’s time to unpack it and install.
setup.py will download and install all the necessary dependencies for MediaCore into your virtual environment:
# Unpack the downloaded distribution tar xzvf MediaCore-0.8.0.tar.gz cd MediaCore-0.8.0 # Install MediaCore! python2.5 setup.py develop
For developers, or users that are very familiar with Git version control, we have a public Git repository. Git is great because it makes it easy to stay right up-to-date with bugfixes as they’re made, and you can contribute changes back by creating your own fork in GitHub.
# Download and install via Git git clone git://github.com/simplestation/mediacore.git cd mediacore # Install! python2.5 setup.py develop
Step 3: Setup the Database¶
The first step here is to create a database for MediaCore in MySQL. You can use phpMyAdmin, CocoaMySQL, cPanel, the mysql command line interface, or any other tool you like.
We’re going to assume that the database is called mediacore, the mysql user is called mediacore_user, and the password is mysecretpassword.
For example, via the mysql command line client:
# Open up the mysql command line interface
mysql -u root
# OR: if you get an error like
# "ERROR: Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: NO)"
# it's probably because your root mysql user has a password. Use -p to enter it.
mysql -u root -p
# Then, inside the mysql shell:
mysql> create database mediacore;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> grant usage on mediacore.* to mediacore_user@localhost identified by 'mysecretpassword';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> grant all privileges on mediacore.* to mediacore_user@localhost;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.33 sec)
mysql> exit;
Bye
The second step is to create all the tables and starting data for the database. All of the information is in setup.sql, so you can load it with a one line command, like so:
# Import initial data into an existing database named mediacore:
mysql -u mediacore_user -p mediacore < setup.sql
If you want to enable the fulltext searching shown on the demo site, you will need to have access to the root account for your MySQL database. Some shared hosts don’t allow this, so we have made this feature optional. To set up the triggers that enable fulltext searching, import setup_triggers.sql like so:
# Import fulltext search database triggers
mysql -u root mediacore < setup_triggers.sql
NOTE: If you do not import setup_triggers.sql, MediaCore’s search will always return no results. You can easily disable this feature in your installation by removing the search form from /path/to/mediacore_install/mediacore/templates/nav.html. In a future release, we plan to design search so that it doesn’t require MySQL’s root account.
Step 4: Preliminary Configuration¶
If you’re installing on your development machine, we’ve included a config file that has things like interactive debugging already configured.
Open up development.ini and have a look through. The default settings should get you started. The only line that needs to be edited right away is the database configuration.
Under the [app:main] heading, look for the sqlalchemy.url setting. It looks like this:
sqlalchemy.url = mysql://username:pass@localhost/dbname?charset=utf8&use_unicode=0
Change the “username”, “pass”, and “dbname” fields to the username, password, and database name you used in Step 3. For example:
sqlalchemy.url = mysql://mediacore_user:mysecretpassword@localhost/mediacore?charset=utf8&use_unicode=0
NOTE 1: For Uploads to work, the directory pointed to by the media_dir setting must be writable by your user.
NOTE 2: For Uploads to work, the media and podcasts folders inside the directory pointed to by the image_dir setting must also be writable by your user.
Step 5: Launch the Built-in Server¶
Now that MediaCore itself is installed and the basics are configured, we can test it out using the Paste server. It’s bundled with TG/Pylons so you have it already, simply run:
paster serve --reload development.ini
Now open http://localhost:8080/ to see how it works! You can try access the admin at http://localhost:8080/admin/ with username: admin, password: admin. (Remember to change your password!)
If this produces errors then MediaCore or one of its dependencies is not setup correctly. Please feel free to ask questions and submit solutions via our community forums.
If this is your development machine, you’re good to go.
Step 6: Production Deployments¶
The built-in Paste server does a great job for development, but usually people demand more in production environments.
- Production Config:
On your production deployment, you’ll want to disable debugging, set up unique password salts, and maybe change some other settings. To do this, you can create a second config file named deployment.ini with the following one line command:
# To create deployment.ini in your current dir: paster make-config MediaCore deployment.iniThen edit deployment.ini as you did for development.ini (e.g. set up the database config line).
- Production Server:
- MediaCore is WSGI-based so there are many possible ways to deploy it. Below are two of the most popular methods:
mod_fastcgi is simplest and will work with most shared hosting environments, so long as the server has mod_fastcgi installed.
mod_wsgi requires root access on your server, but can be tuned for better performance than mod_fastcgi.