Installation and Use

If one has the setuptools package installed, one can simply perform:

sudo easy_install -U ibidas

This will download and install ibidas and some required dependencies. Root/administrator access is required to do this (see Execute from source or Install in a virtualenv if this is not available).

Note

Some distributions might have multiple versions of python installed (both a 3.x and a 2.x version). Ibidas only supports Python 2.x currently. To specify that the python 2.x version should be used, one can often use e.g. ‘easy_install-2.7’ instead of ‘easy_install’ (use tab-completion on the command line to find the available easy_install versions).

Note

If the setuptools package is not available, it is most likely available in the package manager of your distribution. In the unlikely case that it cannot be found there, one can install it as follows:

wget http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py
sudo python ez_setup.py

For more documentation, see http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools

Note

If sudo is not available, use ‘su’ to switch to the administrator account

Note

If numpy (an ibidas depencency) fails to install, use the version supplied by your package manager before installing ibidas. Also, we found that sometimes the numpy installation succeeds (albeit with an error at the end) when installing it separately using e.g. ‘easy_install numpy’. Afterwards, one can continue installing ibidas. For further installation instructions for numpy (and scipy), see http://www.scipy.org/Installing_SciPy/Linux

Warning

Ibidas is currently only tested on the Linux platform, and might will not work out of the box on Windows. Installation on Mac is probably possible (using e.g. macports to install numpy/setuptools, then using easy_install to install ibidas), but is untested. We will look into this in the near future.

Optional dependencies

Ibidas needs some dependencies. Necessary dependencies are automatically installed.

The following packages need to be installed manually (i.e. using the package manager of your distribution) if they are not yet available (an error will be returned in this case):

• psycopg2 (only if access is required to postgres databases)
• MySQLDB (only if access is required to mysql databases)
• other databases are also supported. An error will be returned once you try to connect, with the package that needs to be installed.

Starting ibidas

To start ibidas, one can simply execute:

ibidas

on the command line prompt. This will load the IPython interpreter, with Ibidas preloaded.

If one instead wants to load ibidas within an script or interpreter process, one can simply use:

from ibidas import *

For the rest of this tutorial, we assume the standard Ibidas interpreter is used.

Execute from source

One can also directly execute ibidas from the source package.

Download the source from pypi, then execute:

tar -xzvf ibidas-0.1.22.tar.gz

to extract the source (version number can differ). Enter the source directory using:

cd ibidas-0.1.22

then start ibidas using:

./run

This will install possible dependencies locally.

Note

If one of the dependencies (e.g. numpy) fails to install, use your package manager to install these dependencies. For further installation instructions for numpy (and scipy), see http://www.scipy.org/Installing_SciPy/Linux. Another option is to use a virtualenv (see below).

By executing in the source directory:

source ibidas_env.sh

one will add ibidas to the python path, enabling its use in other scripts using:

from ibidas import *

Install in a virtualenv

Virtualenv allows one to install a python environment in a home directory, removing the need for administrator access. To create a virtual environment, one can use:

curl -O https://raw.github.com/pypa/virtualenv/master/virtualenv.py

python virtualenv.py ibidas_env

chmod +x ibidas_env/bin/activate

Note

If ‘python’ is a python 3.x version, search for a python 2.x version, named e.g. ‘python2’ (use tab-completion to find the available options)

Next, one needs to activate the environment (this has to be done for every terminal that is opened in which the virtualenv is used):

ibidas_env/bin/activate

Subsequently, from such a terminal, one can install and start ibidas:

ibidas_env/bin/pip install ibidas

ibidas

Note

Numpy/Scipy require quite a few libraries to be installed on the system in order to buiild. Look at http://www.scipy.org/Installing_SciPy/Linux for instructions on how to install these packages without root access.

Warning

We encountered some errors in installing the sqlalchemy dependency. This could simply be solved by installing the dependency manually, before installing ibidas:

ibidas_env/bin/pip install sqlalchemy

Manual installation

Alternatively, one can download the source package, and execute in the unpacked source directory:

python setup.py install

Note

If ‘python’ is a python 3.x version, search for a python 2.x version, named e.g. ‘python2’ or ‘python2.7’ (use tab-completion to find the available options)

This requires that any dependencies are installed beforehand.

Ibidas dependencies include:

• python >= 2.6
• numpy >= v1.4.1
• ipython >= 0.10.1
• sqlalchemy >= 0.6.4
• sphinx >= 1.0.5 [only to build documentation]

Also, installing Python database client libraries for sqlite, postgres or mysql, will allow one to use the sql wrapper to connect to these databases.

Performing unit tests and building the documentation can be done manually using:

#unit tests
python setup.py test

#build documentation (available then under docs/_build/html)
python setup.py build_sphinx