How to install¶
You can install Tipboard on a variety of sensible operating systems. This guide assumes Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS and presents shell command examples accordingly.
Prerequisites¶
Tipboard requires Python 2.7 which can be installed with this command:
$ sudo apt-get install python-dev python-virtualenv
Another dependency which needs to be satisfied before proceeding further is Redis server:
$ sudo apt-get install redis-server
Optional yet recommended packages¶
One of such packages is supervisor - it facilitates program administration (e.g. its reboot), especially if there are a few instances launched on the machine.
Based on the Tornado framework, Tipboard has a built-in server available, but a typical use case assumes communication with the world via reverse proxy (e.g. using nginx or apache).
Note
Although configuration of reverse proxy is out of scope of this manual, we would like to emphasise that Tipboard use Web Sockets – a relatively new mechanism – and thus you should ensure a server in a version that will support it (e.g. nginx >= 1.3.13 or apache2 >= 2.4.6). By default Ubuntu 12.04 offers older versions – you may then use backports.
Note
It will be useful to have an updated version of pip (i.e. >= 1.4) and virtualenv (i.e. >= 1.10).
Preparing environment for installation¶
Start by creating a user, the privileges of whom will be used by the application (for the needs of this manual, let’s create the user “pylabs”):
$ sudo adduser pylabs --home /home/pylabs --shell /bin/bash
$ sudo su - pylabs
Virtual environment¶
Continue by creating a virtual environment that will help you conveniently separate your instance from what you already have installed in the system (let’s say we name it “tb-env”):
$ cd /home/pylabs
$ virtualenv tb-env
Activate the created virtual environment with the following command:
$ source /home/pylabs/tb-env/bin/activate
Note
It is worth saving the above line in the ~/.profile file. As a result, the virtual environment will be activated automatically whenever you log in on the machine.
Note
Further setup assumes an activated virtual environment, which is denoted by (tb-env) prefix in your shell prompt.
Installing with pip¶
After creating and activating virtualenv, install the latest (current) version of Tipboard package available on pypi (“Python Package Index”) with the following command:
(tb-env)$ pip install tipboard
Verification¶
To verify if installation has been successful, launch this command:
(tb-env)$ tipboard runserver
If you see the message “Listening on port...” instead of errors, it means that installation was successful and you may proceed to the next section.