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 (mysql-python, PIL) to install properly.
• libjpeg and zlib are also required for certain required Python packages (PIL) to install properly.
• Python setuptools
• Python virtualenv

The Preliminary Requirements Installation page has examples of how to install these packages on a few different platforms. If you haven’t already done so, go there now.

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:

1. 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
   

2. 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: Create the Database

Here we will 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

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: Populate the Database

First, The creation of all database tables and addition of initial data is taken care of via this Pylons command:

paster setup-app development.ini

Second, 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 6: 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 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 7: 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.ini

Then 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:

1. mod_fastcgi is simplest and will work with most shared hosting environments, so long as the server has mod_fastcgi installed.

   • Apache & mod_fastcgi Deployment
     • Components
     • Instructions
     • Testing Installation
     • Performance Enhancements
     • Editing MediaCore

2. mod_wsgi requires root access on your server, but can be tuned for better performance than mod_fastcgi.

   • Apache & mod_wsgi Deployment
     • Components
     • Instructions
     • Performance Enhancements
     • Editing MediaCore