# Quickstart

Want to try Pootle? This guide will guide you through installing Pootle and its requirements in a virtual environment.

Before proceeding, consider installing these first:

- At least Python 2.4
- Django 1.3.x or 1.4.x
- python-pip

If you only want to have a sneak peek of Pootle, the default configuration and the built-in server will suffice. But in case you want to deploy a real world server, installing optional packages, using a real database and a proper web server is highly recommended.

Note

The easiest way to test and install Pootle is by using pip. However, installations can be done straight from git sources or be automated by using fabric deployment scripts.

## Hardware Requirements

Your Pootle installation will need to be flexible enough to handle the translation load. The recommended hardware depends highly on the performance you expect, the number of users you want to support, and the number and size of the files you want to host.

Whatever hardware you have, you will still benefit from performance improvements if you can optimize your system.

Your disk space should always be enough to store your files and your Pootle database, with some extra space available.

## Setting up the Environment

In order to install Pootle you will first create a virtual environment. This allows you to keep track of dependencies without messing up with system packages. For that purpose you need to install the `virtualenv` package. You might already have it, but in case you haven’t:

    $ pip install virtualenv

Now create a virtual environment on your location of choice by issuing the `virtualenv` command:

    $ virtualenv /var/www/pootle/env/

This will copy the system’s default Python interpreter into your environment. For activating the virtual environment you must run the `activate` script:

    $ source /var/www/pootle/env/bin/activate

Every time you activate this virtual environment, the Python interpreter will know where to look for libraries. Also notice the environment name will be prepended to the shell prompt.

## Installing Pootle

After creating the virtual environment, you can safely ask pip to grab and install Pootle by running:

    (env) $ pip install pootle

This will fetch and install the minimum set of required dependencies as well.

Note

If you run into trouble while installing the dependencies, it’s likely that you’re missing some extra packages needed to build those third-party packages. For example, lxml needs a C compiler.

If everything went well, you will now be able to access the `pootle` command line tool within your environment.

    (env) $ pootle --version
    Pootle 2.5.0
    Translate Toolkit 1.10
    Django 1.4.3

## Initializing the Configuration

Once Pootle has been installed, you will need to initialize a configuration file for it. This is as easy as running:

    (env) $ pootle init

By default it writes the configuration file at `~/.pootle/pootle.conf` but if you want you can pass an alternative path as an argument to the `init` command.

This default configuration is enough to initially experiment with Pootle but it’s highly discouraged and unsupported to use this configuration in a production environment. Also, the default configuration uses SQLite, which shouldn’t be used for anything more than testing purposes.

The initial configuration includes the settings that you’re most likely to change. For further customization, you can also check for the full list of available settings.

## Running Pootle

By default Pootle provides a built-in CherryPy server that will be enough for quickly testing the software. To run it, just issue:

    (env) $ pootle start

And the server will start listening on port 8000. This can be accessed from your web browser at `http://localhost:8000/`.

Note

On the very first request Pootle will take a few minutes to setup the database and will scan all the default projects and translation files it ships. Finally, it will redirect to the front page.

If you prefer, you can run this process from the command-line by executing the syncdb and initdb management commands:

    $ pootle syncdb
    $ pootle initdb

## Setting up a Reverse Proxy

By default the Pootle server runs on port 8000 and you will probably be interested on binding it to the usual port 80. Also, it’s highly recommended to have all the static assets served by a proper web server, and setting up a web proxy is the simplest way to go.

The Running under a Web Server section has further information on setting up a web server that proxyes requests to the application server.

If you want to omit a reverse proxy and rather prefer to use a web server for serving both dynamic and static content, you can also setup such a scenario with Apache and mod_wsgi for example.

## Running Pootle as a Service

If you plan to run Pootle as a system service, you can use whatever software you are familiar with for that purpose. For example Supervisor, Circus or daemontools might fit your needs.

## Further Configuration and Tuning

This has been a quickstart for getting you up and running. If you want to continue diving into Pootle, you should first consider making some optimizations to your setup — don’t forget to switch your database backend! After that you should also adjust the application configuration to better suit your specific needs.

For additional scripting and improved management, Pootle also provides a set of management commands to ease the automation of common administration tasks.