Revision 17 as of 2012-09-05 08:06:19

Clear message

This is a quick guide to setup a development environment to work on Postorius, 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 and OS X 10.8.1.

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.

Set up your environment with virtualenv

If you're not already set up to develop with virtualenv, you should do so:

Ubuntu OS X
$ sudo apt-get install python-setuptools python-dev build-essential 
$ brew install python

$ echo "export PATH=/usr/local/share/python:$PATH" >> ~/.bash_profile
$ source ~/.bash_profile
$ pip install distribute 

You're almost there - just get virtualenv:

$ pip install virtualenv

You may wish to install Virtualenvwrapper as well to make managing your virtual environments easier.

For the remaining bit, we're going to assume your virtual environment is called "postorius". You would initialize and activate it as follows:

virtualenv only with virtualenvwrapper
$ virtualenv postorius $ source postorius/bin/activate $ mkvirtualenv postorius

Now you should see (postorius) before your prompt.

Get the sources

(postorius)$ bzr branch lp:mailman
(postorius)$ bzr branch lp:mailman.client
(postorius)$ bzr branch lp:postorius
(postorius)$ bzr branch lp:~mailman-coders/postorius/postorius_standalone

Install Django

(postorius)$ pip install django
(postorius)$ pip install django-social-auth

Get everything set up

GNU Mailman 3

Install and test: 

(postorius)$ cd mailman 
(postorius)$ python bootstrap.py
(postorius)$ bin/buildout
(postorius)$ bin/test

If you get no errors you can now start Mailman: 

(postorius)$ bin/mailman start
(postorius)$ 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)

(postorius)$ cd mailman.client
(postorius)$ python setup.py develop
(postorius)$ cd ..

Postorius

(postorius)$ cd postorius
(postorius)$ python setup.py develop

(postorius)$ cd ..

Start the development server

(postorius)$ cd postorius_standalone
(postorius)$ python manage.py syncdb
(postorius)$ python manage.py runserver

Now go to http://localhost:8000 to see the web UI for mailman!

Comments

Máirín Duffy

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: 

virtualenv --system-site-packages /path/to/your/installation
$ source /path/to/your/installation/bin/activate
$ python setup.py install

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.

Máirín Duffy

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

maxking