Setting up environment#

We strongly advise to use Virtualenv to develop CEKit. Please consult your package manager for the correct package name. Currently within Fedora all the required packages are available as RPMs. A sample set of Ansible scripts that provide all pre-requisites for development are available here.

  • If you are running inside the Red Hat infrastructure then rhpkg must be installed as well.

To create custom Python virtual environment please run following commands on your system:

# Prepare virtual environment
virtualenv ~/cekit
source ~/cekit/bin/activate

# Install as development version
pip install -e <cekit directory>

# Now you are able to run CEKit
cekit --help

It is possible to ask virtualenv to inherit pre-installed system packages thereby reducing the virtualenv to a delta between what is installed and what is required. This is achieved by using the flag --system-site-packages (See here for further information).

Note

Every time you want to use CEKit you must activate CEKit Python virtual environment by executing source ~/cekit/bin/activate

For those using ZSH a useful addition is Zsh-Autoswitch-VirtualEnv the use of which avoids the labour of manually creating the virtualenv and activating it each time ; simply run mkvenv --system-site-packages initially and then it is handled automatically then on.