2.2. Installing PyBlosxom

Installing PyBlosxom should take 5-10 minutes depending on what state your system is currently in. The installation consists of seven steps. Tweaking, styling, and adding content to your blog is covered in later chapters of this manual.

Here are the steps you need to do to install PyBlosxom:

1. Download PyBlosxom: Go to http://pyblosxom.sourceforge.net/ , click on the Download link, and download the latest PyBlosxom .tar.gz file.

2. Untar PyBlosxom: Create a working temporary directory, move the PyBlosxom tar ball into it, and then untar the tar ball (something like tar -xzvf pyblosxom.version.tar.gz).

3. Copy the scripts: Copy the pyblosxom.cgi and config.py files from the web/ directory into your cgi-bin directory.

4. Create the necessary directories: Create a myblog directory and in that directory create the following subdirectories: entries (the datadir), flavours (the flavourdir) and plugins (the plugin dir).

5. Edit the config.py file: Open your config.py file up in your favorite editor. Go through and change the values of the configuration settings according to the instructions.

   Make sure to set the datadir property to the datadir directory you created, the flavourdir property to the flavourdir directory you created, the plugins_dir property to the plugins directory you created, and the codebase property to the directory you untarred PyBlosxom into.

6. Verify your installation: Run ./pyblosxom.cgi from the commandline. That will do a first-blush run to make sure things are configured correctly and let you know if there are missing pieces in your config.py file.

7. Write your first post and test: Open up the file firstpost.txt in the datadir directory in your favorite editor and copy the following text into it:

   Example 2-1. first post

   This is my first post
   <p>
     This is my first post with PyBlosxom.
   </p>
   

   Open up a web-browser and go to the URL http://your_server_here/path/to/cgi-bin/pyblosxom.cgi

   If everything is configured correctly, you should see your first post rendered with the default HTML flavour. If not, you'll either see a Python stack trace or a message along the lines of Internal Server Error. In the latter case, check your web-server's error logs for more details.