Dependencies

The list of other software that pywws depends on looks frighteningly long at first glance. However, many of these packages won’t be needed by most users. What you need depends on what you want to do with pywws. Remember, it’s a “kit of parts” rather than a monolithic application.

Some of the requirements are Python packages that can be downloaded from the Python Package Index (PyPI). I recommend using pip to install these.

You should be able to install the remaining dependencies using your operating system’s package manager. This is a lot easier than downloading and compiling source files from the project websites. Note that some Linux distributions use different names for some of the packages, e.g. in Ubuntu, pyusb is called python-usb.

Note: some of these libraries may have their own dependencies that you may need to install. Follow the links to read more about each library’s requirements.

Essential

  • Python version 2.5 or higher

Python 3 is supported, but some things might not work properly. If you find a problem with Python 3, please send a message to the mailing list or submit a bug report on GitHub.

You will probably be able to install pip with your system’s package manager, where it may be called python-pip or python3-pip or something similar. If not, download and run the get-pip.py file from the pip web site. In either case you should immediately use pip to install the latest version of itself:

sudo pip install --upgrade pip

Make sure you install the correct Python version’s pip. If you want to install pywws for both Python 2 and Python 3 you will need pip2 and pip3.

This is a handy little module that provides information on your local time zone. It’s best installed with pip:

sudo pip install tzlocal

USB library

To retrieve data from a weather station pywws needs a python library that allows it to communicate via USB. There is a variety of USB libraries that can be used. Not all of them are available on all computing platforms, which may restrict your choice.

Mac OS X

On MacOS X the operating system’s generic hid driver “claims” the weather station, which makes it very difficult to use any other USB interface. Unfortunately, you will need to download and compile hidapi yourself.

  • hidapi
  • ctypes (your package manager may know it as python-ctypes)

If you can’t install ctypes then you can try the Cython interface to hidapi instead:

Other systems

Other systems use a Python interface to the libusb system library. There is a choice of interface and library version - install the latest that is available for your computer.

pip install libusb1

or

  • libusb version 1.x or version 0.1 (should be available from the package manager)
  • PyUSB version 1.0
pip install pyusb --pre

The --pre flag enables the installation of “pre release” versions, such as the current beta release (1.0.0b2) of pyusb.

If neither of these options works for you then you can use hidapi – see the Mac OS X instructions above.

Veranderd in versie 15.01.0.dev1265: added ability to use python-libusb1 interface.

Flexible timed tasks

The pywws.Tasks module can do tasks at particular times and/or dates. This requires the croniter library. (Simple hourly, daily or ‘live’ tasks don’t need this library.)

pip install croniter

Running as a daemon

The pywws.livelogdaemon program runs pywws live logging as a proper UNIX daemon process. It requires the python-daemon library:

pip install python-daemon

Graph drawing

The pywws.Plot module uses gnuplot to draw graphs. If you want to produce graphs of weather data, e.g. to include in a web page, you need to install the gnuplot application:

  • gnuplot v4.2 or higher (should be available from the package manager)

After installing gnuplot you should edit weather.ini (see weather.ini - configuration file format) and set the gnuplot version config item. Finding out the installed gnuplot version is easy:

gnuplot -V

Secure website uploading (sftp)

The pywws.Upload module can use “ftp over ssh” (sftp) to upload files to your web-site. Normal uploading just uses Python’s standard modules, but if you want to use sftp you need to install these two modules:

sudo pip install pycrypto paramiko

Twitter updates

The pywws.ToTwitter module can be used to send weather status messages to Twitter. Posting to Twitter requires these modules:

sudo pip install python-twitter oauth2

or

sudo pip install tweepy oauth2

Note that tweepy appears to be the less reliable of the two. If you have problems, e.g. with character encoding, try installing python-twitter instead.

Veranderd in versie 13.10_r1086: reenabled use of tweepy library as an alternative to python-twitter. python-oauth2 is still required by pywws.TwitterAuth.

Veranderd in versie 13.06_r1023: pywws previously used the tweepy library instead of python-twitter and python-oauth2.

MQTT

Nieuw in versie 14.12.0.dev1260.

The pywws.toservice module can be used to send weather data to an MQTT broker. This requires the paho-mqtt module:

sudo pip install paho-mqtt

To create new language translations

pywws can be configured to use languages other than English, as described in How to use pywws in another language. The Babel package is required to extract the strings to be translated and to compile the translation files.

sudo pip install babel

Copying files to or from Transifex requires the transifex-client package.

sudo pip install transifex-client

Translating the documentation using local files needs the sphinx-intl package.

sudo pip install sphinx-intl

Veranderd in versie 14.05.dev1209: pywws previously used the gettext package.

To ‘compile’ the documentation

The documentation of pywws is written in “ReStructured text”. A program called Sphinx is used to convert this easy to write format into HTML for use with a web browser. If you’d like to create a local copy of the documentation (so you don’t have to rely on the online version, or to test a translation you’re working on) you need to install Sphinx, version 1.3 or later.

sudo pip install sphinx

Comments or questions? Please subscribe to the pywws mailing list http://groups.google.com/group/pywws and let us know.