Introduction

============

The new installer script written in Python is intended to replace the

old installer, written in Perl. It has been implemented to work

exactly as the old one, supporting all the same options, etc.

Requirements

============

The script should work with both Python v. 2 and 3. It was tested with

v. 2.7.16 and v. 3.7.16. Version 3.7 or newer is strongly

recommended, since the version 2 has been officially EOL-ed as of

Jan. 1 2020. If you have to use Python 2, we intend to maintain

backward compatibility, for now, but please use version 2.7 or newer.

The extra module psycopg2 (PostgreSQL client) is required. The

installer has been tested with psycopg2 version 2.8.4.

We recommend that you try installing the "binary", pre-built version of the package:

pip install psycopg2-binary

(or "pip3 install psycopg2-binary" if you intend to use python3 and it's

installed separately on your system)

If for whatever reason the binary psycopg2 package doesn't run

properly on your system, you can try the more complex process of

making pip build it from sources:

pip3 install psycopg2

This will require compilers to be properly installed on your system.

(On MacOS, you'll need XCode installed).

In order to link with the PostgresQL libraries, pip will need to

execute pg_config, PostgreSQL configuration utility. Make sure it is

in your PATH. If you have multiple versions of PostgresQL installed,

make sure the version that you will be using with Dataverse is the

first on your PATH. For example,

PATH=/usr/pgsql-9.6/bin:$PATH; export PATH

Certain libraries and source include files, both for PostgresQL and

Python, are also needed to compile the module. On

RedHat/CentOS/etc. you may need to install the -devel packages, *for

the specific versions* of PostgreSQL and Python you will be using. For

example:

yum install postgresql96-devel

yum install python37-devel

etc.

On MacOS, all the needed libraries and source files appear to be

included by default with standard distributions of PostgreSQL and

Python.

Howto

=====

Run the new installer script as

python install.py

or

python3 install.py

(if python3 is installed separately from the default version 2)

If you run into any problems, or have any suggestions, please let us

know. Once again, this is still a beta/experimental version.

And if getting it to work on your system ends up being too much

trouble, there's always an option of going back to the old, default

installer.