3.1. Installation¶

This tutorial assumes you have Git and Python 3 installed.

3.1.1. Install Prerequisites¶

One of the dependencies (Postgres library Psycopg2) should be built from source.

To install GCC on Debian, open a terminal window and type:

$ sudo apt install build-essential

To check gcc is installed, type:

$ gcc --version

To install the Python 3 header files type:

$ sudo apt-get install python3-dev

This To install libbq-dev type:

$ sudo apt-get install libpq-dev

First you will need to download wsbackend by cloning its Git repository. Open a terminal window, browse to a folder of your choice and type:

$ git clone https://github.com/websensor/wsbackend.git

The GitHub repository will be cloned to a folder named wsbackend. Open this by typing:

$ cd wsbackend

We will use virtualbox to create a virtual environment. This will isolate our wsbackend installation from the rest of the system.

First install virtualenv:

$ sudo pip3 install virtualenv

Next create a virtual environment named wsbackend_env:

$ virtualenv wsbackend_env

In order for pip to install dependencies into the virtual enviornment, you must activate it first with:

$ source wsbackend_env/bin/activate

wsbackend is dependent on a number of Python packages including flask. These are listed in requirements.txt.

To install all requirements, type:

$ pip3 install -r requirements.txt

There are many options for serving this Flask application. In this tutorial we will use Gunicorn. It is the easiest to install:

$ pip3 install gunicorn

Next run the application with:

$ gunicorn main:app