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Help On Installing/ Basic Installation

Basic Installation

Before you can integrate MoinMoin into your web environment, you have to do the basic installation using the standard Python distutils mechanism. We'll explain the usual steps you need to take to do this. For more details on the distutils installation process, consult the [WWW]Installing Python Modules document of your Python manual.

/!\ NOTE: You will need the Python Development package installed on UNIX systems for distutils to work correctly.

The first step is to unpack the distribution archive, which you have done already when you loaded this instructions from your disk. If you read this on the web, the distribution comes in a versioned ZIP or TAR archive, which you can unpack in the usual ways, into a temporary directory (/tmp on UNIX, C:\TEMP on Windows). The distribution archive will always unpack into a directory named moin-<version>, for example moin-1.1. To download the distribution archive, go to the [WWW]download area.

After unpacking, to install into a specific directory (C:\moin in our example), call setup.py after changing your current directory to the distribution directory. The following commands can be used to complete theses steps:

    unzip moin-1.1.zip
    cd moin-1.1
    python setup.py --quiet install --prefix=C:\moin

This creates the following directories in "C:\moin" (note that on a UNIX system, the directory layout will be slightly different):

    MoinMoin
    MoinMoin/action
    MoinMoin/formatter
    MoinMoin/i18n
    MoinMoin/macro
    MoinMoin/parser
    MoinMoin/scripts
    MoinMoin/support
    MoinMoin/twisted
    MoinMoin/webapi
    Scripts
    share
    share/moin
    share/moin/cgi-bin
    share/moin/data
    share/moin/data/backup
    share/moin/data/cache
    share/moin/data/pages
    share/moin/data/plugin
    share/moin/data/plugin/action
    share/moin/data/plugin/macro
    share/moin/data/text
    share/moin/data/user
    share/moin/htdocs
    share/moin/htdocs/css
    share/moin/htdocs/img

You will likely see the following warning:

warning: install: modules installed to 'C:\moin\', which

is not in Python's module search path (sys.path) -- you'll have to change the search path yourself

This means exactly what it says, you need to add your install directory to the search path of Python. There are several ways to do this:

Environment variable

Change PYTHONPATH in a way that is persistent (/etc/profile.d on UNIX, AUTOEXEC.BAT on W9x, the Properties item in the context menu of My Computer on NT4 and W2K)

Apache "httpd.conf"

Use the SetEnv directive to set PYTHONPATH to a suitable value, for example:

    SetEnv PYTHONPATH "C:\moin"

"moin.cgi"

Directly add your installation directory to the CGI driver script, like this:

    import sys
    sys.path.append('C:/moin')

If you use the following default installation command, MoinMoin will be installed to the Python directory:

    python setup.py --quiet install

You won't need to change your PYTHONPATH then, but depending on your system environment you might not be able to use that command, especially when you are not the root user on a UNIX system. If you don't know where your Python directory is, this command will tell you:

    python -c "import sys; print sys.prefix"

The directory structure we showed above will then be created in that directory. If you're interested in the exact list of files that are installed, use the --record option of distutils.