Installation¶

This guide provides you with all the information you need to get your personal local development instance of element43 running, so you can start hacking on it as soon as possible. Should you encounter any problems do not hesitate to ask us on irc.coldfront.net on channel #element43!

Virtual Development Environment¶

Our virtual devevelopment environment and its installation instructions can be found here. Just follow the instructions to automatically set up your very own instance of Element43!

Manual Installation Instructions¶

Prerequisites¶

Windows¶

You are running Windows? No problem! Get VirtualBox and set up a Linux VM as element43 was not designed to run on Windows. It is recommended to pick a distribution like Ubuntu Desktop for both running and editing element43. This gives you the advantage of having a self-contained portable development environment with all the editors and tools you need, instead of having to deal with transferring files between your host system and the guest system. Continue reading in the Linux section of this page once you are done installing Linux.

OS X¶

Running element43 on OS X is simple. First, download and install Xcode 4 and its command line tools. Second, install the package manager Homebrew and run

brew install libevent memcached libmemcached gfortran zeromq redis

from your favorite terminal app. This installs the basic binary dependencies of element43. The only thing missing is the PostgreSQL server: Just download and install Postgres.app The login credentials are:

Host: localhost

User: <your os x user>

Password: <empty>

You should change those parameters later on. Finally, run

sudo easy_install pip

Linux¶

For running element43 on Linux you need several packages installed:

libevent-dev
memcached
libmemcached-dev
gfortran
libatlas-base-dev
libzmq
postgresql-server
postgresql-client
python-dev
python-pip

The actual names of the packages may vary in you distribution. You should be able to use this list with on Debian-based distros like Ubuntu. There are tons of tutorials on the net how to configure the individual components so this won’t be covered in this article - just google around if you are not sure.

Setting up element43¶

The following steps apply for all operating systems.

Setting up virtualenv¶

To keep all of element43’s dependencies cleanly separated from your local packages, we will be setting up a virtualenv for the new installation.

Create a new folder where you want to install element43 to
cd into that folder and run sudo pip install virtualenv and sudo pip install virtualenvwrapper
Run source /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh and/or add this line to your .bashrc or .zshrc so you are able to use virtualenvwrapper without having to source it every single time
Followed by mkvirtualenv element43 to create a virtualenv named element43

Forking / Cloning element43¶

Unless you already have commit rights for the main repository , fork it into your own GitHub account so you can actually write to the repo.

Run git clone --recursive <your repository url here>

From now on we will assume that your repo’s root directory is called ``element43``.

Installing Python dependencies¶

Run add2virtualenv element43/webapp to add element43 to your Python path
Run echo "export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=element43.settings.local" >> $VIRTUAL_ENV/bin/postactivate
Run echo "unset DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE" >> $VIRTUAL_ENV/bin/postdeactivate
Run export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=element43.settings.local
Run pip install -r element43/requirements/local.txt to install the Python dependencies for developers

There is a high probability of this process failing (especially on Linux) mainly due to missing requirements. If you encounter any problems, have a close look at the error messages to identify the cause of the error. If cannot solve it on your own, head for the IRC.

Preparing the database¶

Create a database and a user called element43 with the password element43 using either the cli or a tool like pgAdmin or Navicat
CREATE DATABASE "element43" WITH OWNER "element43" ENCODING 'UTF8' LC_COLLATE = 'en_US.UTF-8' LC_CTYPE = 'en_US.UTF-8' TEMPLATE template0;
- Ensure the new user has all rights for the newly-created database!
- Only if you have no other choice edit the settings file at element43/webapp/element43/settings/local.py
Navigate to element43/webapp/ then ./manage.py syncdb and do not create a superuser
Run ./manage.py migrate eve_db
Run ./manage.py migrate apps.common
Run ./manage.py migrate apps.market_data
Run ./manage.py migrate apps.api
Run ./manage.py migrate djcelery
Download and extract the latest dump from http://files.zweizeichen.org/dump.zip
Import the dump with django-admin.py eve_import_ccp_dump <location of dump>
Seed your DB with the latest API info available from CCP via django-admin.py initapi

Running element43¶

Ensure postgresql-server, memcached and redis-server are running and properly configured

Gather initial market data¶

Pick one of the two consumers available
- Either the standard Python one located at element43/consumer/ - its setup instructions are located on this site, too
- Or the 100% hipster NodeJS one which is more efficient and does not require cron jobs to work properly, however you have to install NodeJS and npm first
Let the consumer run for some hours to gather some initial data

Additional applications¶

Run celery worker -P eventlet -c 10 -A element43 for parallel EVE API polling and several other scheduled tasks
Run celery -A element43 beat for task scheduling
Run python pathfind.py at element43/pathfind for the pathfinding API

Running the devserver¶

You should then be ready to run the development webserver (element43/webapp): django-admin.py runserver
Congratulations! You are ready to hack on element43 now :D