Verbatim:Development/Dev Instance

Verbatim » Development / Dev Instance

Setting up a Pootle development instance

Pootle's installation instructions are on the Pootle wiki. Make sure to follow the (django-based) installation instructions, not the ones referring to jToolkit.

• have Python 2.4-2.6 installed (Mozilla is currently running 2.4 in production)
• grab an svn checkout of the Pootle trunk:
  • svn co https://translate.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/translate/src/trunk pootle ... or
  • git svn clone -Ttrunk https://translate.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/translate/src/ pootle
  • if you are using git-svn, make sure to generate an empty dbs directory, as git won't pick up empty directories [1]
• if you do not want to install Pootle's requirements into your global Python environment, create a clean, virtual Python environment for the application, using virtualenv. Note that this is not required, but may be helpful if you develop on multiple python-based projects
  • virtualenv --no-site-packages --python=path/to/python2.[4-6] pootle-env
  • cd pootle-env/
  • source bin/activate
• Install the prerequisites. Some notes:
  • PyLucene and Xapian are not vital
  • The translate toolkit is part of the Pootle project too, and while it comes with an svn checkout of the trunk you still need to install it:
    • cd pootle
    • python setup.py install
• Initialize the database by running the ./PootleServer script once.
  • Note for OS X users: At this point you may get an error that lxml is not installed. Running easy_install lxml didn't work for me, but it might work for you. Instead what I had to do was download the lxml.tqz and then:
    • tar -xvzf lxml-2.2.1.tgz
    • cd lxml-2.2.1
    • python setup.py build --static-deps
    • python setup.py install
  • The issue apparently is that lxml requires newer versions of the libxml and libxslt libraries than the system offers. Building from source with the --static-deps flag will force lxml to download the versions it needs and link against those. More details are available on the lxml website.

• You can run the pootle server later by using ./manage.py runserver PORTNUMBER (if you omit PORTNUMBER, it'll default to 8000) [2]