Installation

This document will outline the installation process of Fietsboek, step-by-step.

Requirements

Fietsboek has the following requirements (apart from the Python modules, which will be installed by pip):

  • Python 3.7 or later

  • A redis server, used for caching and temporary data

  • (Optionally) an SQL database server like PostgreSQL or MariaDB (if SQLite is not enough)

Creating an Environment

It is advised that you keep your Fietsboek installation in a separate virtual environment. This makes sure that the dependencies that Fietsboek pulls in do not interfere with your system’s libraries, and it makes sure that you can upgrade those components easily without affecting other installed programs.

We will assume that you create your environment in the .venv folder. Any path can be choosen, you just need to remember it for later

# If Python 3 is the default on your system:
virtualenv .venv
# Otherwise:
virtualenv -p python3 .venv

Installing the Python Modules

The Python package manager takes care of installing all dependencies, all you need to do is tell it to install Fietsboek:

# Assuming that we are in the Fietsboek folder
.venv/bin/pip install .
# Alternatively
.venv/bin/pip path/to/fietsboek/repository

Optionally, you can install lxml, which provides a faster XML parser to process the GPX files:

.venv/bin/pip install lxml

Configuring Fietsboek

Before you can run Fietsboek, you need to adjust your configuration. See Configuration for that.

Setting up the Database

Fietsboek users the fietsupdate script to handle database migrations and other update tasks. You can use it to set up the initial database schema:

.venv/bin/fietsupdate update -c production.ini

Adding an Administrator User

You can use the fietsctl command line program to add administrator users:

.venv/bin/fietsctl -c production.ini useradd --admin

Running Fietsboek

To run Fietsboek, simply run

.venv/bin/pserve production.ini

Warning

It is strongly advised that you use a httpd configured with SSL as a reverse proxy (such as Apache2 or nginx) to handle external traffic to Fietsboek!

Fietsboek itself does not use SSL encryption for its traffic, and not setting up a proper reverse proxy will put your users’ data at risk!

The default server uses waitress and should be enough for small to medium traffic. It is implemented purely in Python and should run on most systems.

Alternatively, you can switch to gunicorn or mod_wsgi for better performance. For those, refer to the Pyramid documentation for more information:

Maintaining Fietsboek

A good installation should be well-oiled, which means it should be updated to new versions and backups should be done frequently.