These instructions cover manual installation of the prerequisites for OpenBlock and installation of the base Openblock software.
(You can skip this if you are cloning our AMI image.)
If you have problems...
Please drop a line to the project mailing list or visit the IRC channel #openblock on freenode with any problems you encounter. We're glad to help.
System Requirements
Note: See the GeoDjango installation documentation for specific lists of packages to install based on your distribution or OS.
Linux, OSX, or some other Unix flavor is required. Windows is not supported by the OpenBlock team, and may never be; but patches are welcome :)
Generally, you need:
- python 2.6 (2.7 might work; 2.5 is too old)
- Postgresql 8.3, 8.4, or 9.0
- PostGIS 1.4 or 1.5
- libxml2 and libxslt
- libgdal
- git
- subversion
- wget
- unzip
Optionally, it may be helpful to install prebuilt packages for the following if your distribution provides them:
- python lxml bindings
- python gdal bindings
The GeoDjango installation documentation may have some useful information as well, as the majority of the requirements are just those of GeoDjango + PostGIS.
Don't forget ldconfig!
Typically after installing libraries, you will need to run this command:
$ sudo ldconfig
... in order for new libraries to be found while building software.
Database Setup
GeoDjango requires a spatial database; more specifically, OpenBlock requires PostGIS. This documentation generally assumes you are installing OpenBlock and Postgres on the same server. If you are using a remote server, please read Running PostGIS on a remote server and make adjustments accordingly.
OpenBlock is known to work with Postgresql 8.3, 8.4, or 9.0, and PostGIS 1.4 or 1.5.
PostGIS template setup
Regardless of whether you run postgresql locally or on another host, you'll want a PostGIS template database. Some platforms install this automatically for you, some don't.
You (or your database admin) should follow the instructions for in the GeoDjango documentation and be sure to heed the Note about varying names and locations of the relevant files.
Database Access Settings
The following instructions (and the default settings) assume that there is
an openblock database user which can create a database for use with openblock.
You can create an openblock user by running:
$ sudo ‑u postgres createuser —createrole —createdb openblock
Depending on your database security setup, you may need to adjust the instructions, settings of postgres and/or settings of openblock.
Postgres administration is beyond the scope of these instructions, but as a quickstart, you can disable postgres security for local users by changing the pg_hba.conf file under etc (the precise location varies, but for postgresql
8.4 on Ubuntu it's /etc/postgresql/8.4/main/pg_hba.conf), comment
out any line that starts with local all, and add a line like
this:
local all all trust
Then restart postgresql. This is not suitable for production.
See the PostgreSQL documentation or the GeoDjango installation documentation for more information.
Testing Database Access
If the openblock user is configured correctly, you should be able to execute:
$ createdb ‑U openblock test_ob_access
$ dropdb ‑U openblock test_ob_access
Next Steps
Now that your system is prepped, you are ready to move on to Installing the Openblock Software.