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

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.