You will need Python 2.6 or newer to get started, so firstly you should have an up to date Python 2.x installation. If you want to use Plan with Python 3 have a look at Python 3 Support.
Virtualenv is really great, maybe it is what you want to use during development. Why virtualenv? There are chances that you use Python for other projects besides Plan-managed cron jobs. It is likely that you will be working with different versions of Python, or libraries. And virtualenv is the solution if two of your projects have conflicting dependencies.
You can install virtualenv by the following commands:
$ sudo easy_install virtualenv
or better:
$ sudo pip install virtualenv
Once you have virtualenv installed, it is easy to set up one working environment. Let’s create one project folder and one venv folder for example:
$ mkdir myproject
$ cd myproject
$ virtualenv venv
New python executable in venv/bin/python
Installing setuptools, pip...done.
Now if you want to activate the corresponding environment, just do:
$ . venv/bin/activate
You can just type the following command to get Plan:
$ pip install plan
If you are not using virtualenv, you will have to do one system-wide installation:
$ sudo pip install plan
Get the source code from github and run it in development mode:
$ git clone https://github.com/fengsp/plan.git
$ cd plan
$ virtualenv venv
New python executable in venv/bin/python
Installing setuptools, pip...done.
$ . venv/bin/activate
$ python setup.py develop
...
Finished processing dependencies for Plan
Then you can use git pull origin to update to the latest version.