HOWTO: install Transifex with Mysql on Debian Lenny

Transifex is a not-so-well-known opensource localization platform, written in Python and running on Django (a Python based application server, if you don’t know it). So, being not so well known, there isn’t a lot of documentation about it, and how to install it under Debian 5 Lenny it’s almost undocumented. So, here we go.

First of all, you have to install some packages. Luckily Lenny has got lot of them, although not all the needed

# aptitude install django python-urlgrabber python-setuptools python-pygments python-openid python-markdown python-httplib2
# aptitude install subversion
# aptitude install python-mysqldb
# aptitude install build-essential python-dev

These should be all the packages needed by Transifex which are available as deb packages. Now let’s install the remaining ones through easy_install

# easy_install django-authopenid django-pagination
# easy_install -f http://transifex.org/files/eggs/ contact_form tagging
# easy_install django-notification
# easy_install mercurial

Now the last package, django_evolution which is, AFAIK, only available as an SVN checkout from Google Code

# svn checkout http://django-evolution.googlecode.com/svn/trunk /tmp/django-evol
# mv /tmp/django-evol/django_evolution /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/

Now we can download the Transifex tarball

# cd /tmp && wget http://transifex.org/files/transifex-0.6.tar.gz
# tar xzvf transifex-0.6.tar.gz
# cp -a transifex-0.6/transifex /var/www

Now we have to edit some configuration files located in /var/www/transifex/settings with particular attention to the database backend configuration stored in 20-engines.conf. Take this as example

DATABASE_ENGINE = 'mysql'
DATABASE_NAME = 'transifex'
DATABASE_USER = 'transifex'
DATABASE_PASSWORD = 'secret_password'
DATABASE_HOST = 'ADDRESS-OF-YOUR-DB'             # Set to empty string for local socket
DATABASE_PORT = '3306'             # Set to empty string for default

obviously you must create a database (called ‘transifex’ in this example) in your database server and give full permissions to a dedicated user (called ‘transifex’ with ’secret_password’ as password in this example). You can do it with these commands in your mysql console:

CREATE DATABASE transifex;
GRANT ALL ON transifex.* to 'transifex'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'secret_password';

Now we can run the configuration scripts, located in the transifex’s base dir

# cd /var/www/transifex
# ./manage.py syncdb
# ./manage.py txcreatedirs
# ./manage.py runserver

Now we can execute a server instance, listening on address $IPADDRESS and port 8088,  and then we can access it fro http://$IPADDRESS:8088 in our web browser. Remember to use nohup if yoiu want to detach it from the console

# ./manage.py $IPADDRESS:8088