This is a quick guide to setup a development environment to work on Mailman 3's web ui. If all goes as planned, you should be done within ~5 minutes. This has been tested on Ubuntu 11.04.
In order to download the components necessary you need to have the Bazaar VCS installed on your system. Mailman and mailman.client need at least Python version 2.6.
GNU Mailman 3
First download the latest revision of Mailman 3 from launchpad.
$ bzr branch lp:mailman
Install and test:
$ cd mailman $ python bootstrap.py $ bin/buildout $ bin/test
If you get no errors you can now start Mailman:
$ bin/mailman start $ cd ..
At this point Mailman will not send nor receive any real emails. But that's fine as long as you only want to work on the components related to the ReST client or the web ui.
mailman.client (the Python bindings for Mailman's ReST API)
Download from launchpad:
$ bzr branch lp:mailman.client
Install in development mode to be able to change the code without working directly on the PYTHONPATH.
$ cd mailman.client $ sudo python setup.py develop $ cd ..
Django >= 1.3
The web ui is a pluggable Django application. Therefore you need to have Django (at least version 1.3) installed. Also install the django-social-auth application (added because of open Id work going on).
$ wget http://www.djangoproject.com/download/1.3.1/tarball/ -O Django-1.3.1.tar.gz $ tar xzf Django-1.3.1.tar.gz $ cd Django-1.3.1 $ sudo python setup.py install $ cd .. $ pip install django-social-auth
mailmanweb
$ bzr branch lp:mailmanweb $ cd mailmanweb $ sudo python setup.py develop
Start the development server
$ cd dev_setup $ python manage.py syncdb $ python manage.py runserver
The last command will start the dev server on http://localhost:8000
A note for MacOS X users (and possibly others running python 2.7)
On an OS X 10.7 (Lion) system, some of these steps needed to be modified to use python2.6 instead of python. (In particular, bzr is known to behave badly when used python2.7 on OS X 10.7 at the moment hopefully this will be fixed and no longer an issue soon.)
You will need to install the latest version of XCode on MacOS 10.7, which is available for free from the app store. If you had a previous version of XCode installed when you upgraded to 10.7, it will no longer work and will not have automatically been upgraded, so be prepared to install again. Once you have it installed from the app store, you will still need to go run the installer from /Applications to complete the installation.
Comments
I wrote up a guide on how to get hyperkitty up and running for development, and it includes the full modified steps I ran based on this document to get mailman 3 working. That guide is here:
https://fedorahosted.org/hyperkitty/wiki/DevelopmentSetupGuide
The latest setup guide is available here: http://gnu-mailman.readthedocs.org/en/latest/src/mailman/docs/WebUIin5.html
It looks like bootstrap.py was removed in late July, marked as obsolete. I followed these instructions to get mailman and postorious running, except I replaced the bootstrap.py step with the following:
Now, if you get weird errors, remove the --system-site-packages from your virtualenv and try again. I guess depending on how your system is setup, it may or may not work with that option.