Installing Merlot

This document will guide you through the steps of installing Merlot. This guide was written for an Ubuntu 10.10 system, there may be some differences with other systems.

Install the required system packages

Before even getting the source code, we need to make sure you have all the system level dependencies installed. The following command will take care of it:

$ sudo apt-get install mercurial python-virtualenv python-dev libxslt-dev libxml2-dev python-pip

Create and build the buildout

We are approaching a buildout-based installation.

The first thing you need to do is to install the MerlotTemplates package, which provides a PasteScript template to create a buildout that sets up Merlot:

$ pip install MerlotTemplates

Now you are ready to create the buildout:

$ paster create -t merlot_buildout merlot

Provide the Merlot version to be used when the question is prompted. Then create a virtual environment inside the buildout directory that you’ve just generated:

$ cd merlot
$ virtualenv --python=/usr/bin/python2.6 --no-site-packages .
$ source bin/activate

Now you can run buildout:

$ python bootstrap.py
$ buildout

And you are ready to start Merlot:

$ merlot fg

This will start the server on port 8080 with basic authentication in front.

First steps with Merlot

Once the server is up, point your browser to http://localhost:8080/ and authenticate using admin for both user name and password. This will take you to an administration screen. There you can create a Merlot application.

The first thing you will want to do is to add users and clients. Projects will be later associated to clients.

Once you’ve added at least one client, you can proceed to add a project, that is the main concept of Merlot.