Virtualenv, Plone, and Centos 5.x

// under centos easy_install plone python rpm virtualenv

EDIT: Watch out for python-ldap 2.3.10, the latest version at time of writing. Seems like there’s an issue with it and Centos 5.4. Forcing python-ldap to be version 2.3.8 works, though. (easy_install python-ldap==2.3.8)

Previously, you might have read about setting up a Virtualenv on Ubuntu Jaunty. Now, that was reasonably painless since python-virtualenv and python-setuptools is in the Ubuntu repo. Whether it’s my Centos servers and their misguided repos or me just not being able to find such a related rpm packages, Centos just needs little more love to get it to the same setup. (Note: actually, there was a setuptools RPM that I installed, but no idea why it didn’t give me easy_install…)

Here’s what we’re looking at for this time around.

• Install the dependencies and various development libraries needed for PIL etc:

  yum install gcc gdbm-devel readline-devel ncurses-devel zlib-devel bzip2-devel sqlite-devel db4-devel openssl-devel tk-devel bluez-libs-devel libjpeg-devel zlib-devel freetype-devel
  

• Install setuptools and virtualenv:

  wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/2.4/s/setuptools/setuptools-0.6c9-py2.4.egg#md5=260a2be2e5388d66bdaee06abec6342a
  sh setuptools-0.6c9-py2.4.egg
  rm -f setuptools-0.6c9-py2.4.egg
  easy_install-2.4 -U setuptools
  easy_install-2.4 virtualenv
  

• Create a virtual environment and activate it:

  virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python2.4 .
  source ./bin/activate
  

• Easy install the dependencies of Plone. Not sure if they’re needed for Centos, but it did all work nicely after doing this:

  easy_install --find-links http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/ Imaging
  easy_install --find-links http://download.zope.org/distribution PILwoTK
  easy_install python-ldap
  easy_install lxml
  

Clear as mud? I thought so. Essentially the only difference is actually getting the right development libraries and then getting setuptools itself working correctly. As I mentioned, for whatever reason my python-setuptools rpm doesn’t have easy install. Maybe it’s because it’s an old version? Who knows. This is an easy enough workaround.

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