Installation

Note

This installation guide covers Postorius, the web user interface for GNU Mailman 3. To install GNU Mailman follow the instructions in the documentation: http://packages.python.org/mailman/

Install Dependencies

Django:

$ sudo pip install django

mailman.client:

$ bzr branch lp:mailman.client
$ cd mailman.client
$ sudo python setup.py install

Install Postorius

Latest release

If you just want to install the latest release of Postorius, install it from PyPi:

$ sudo pip install postorius

or:

$ sudo easy_install postorius

Latest dev version

If you want to keep up to date with the latest development version, you should install Postorius using bazaar:

$ bzr branch lp:postorius
$ cd postorius
$ sudo python setup.py develop
$ cd ..

You can always pull in the latest changes from the development branch:

$ cd postorius
$ bzr pull
$ cd ..

Setup your django project

Since you have now installed the necessary packages to run Postorius, it’s time to setup your Django site.

First, get the project directory from launchpad:

$ bzr branch lp:~mailman-coders/postorius/postorius_standalone

Second, change the database setting in postorius_standalone/settings.py to your preferred database. If you’re OK with using sqlite, just change the path in line 48 to the correct location.

Note

Detailed information on how to use different databse engines can be found in the Django documentation.

Third, prepare the database:

$ cd postorius_standalone
$ python manage.py syncdb
$ cd ..

This will create the .db file (if you ar using SQLite) and will setup all the necessary db tables. You will also be prompted to create a superuser which will act as an admin account for Postorius.

See also

Robert Niederreiter has provided a buildout for GNU Mailman 3 and Postorius.

Running the development server

The quickest way to run postorius is to just start the development server:

$ cd postorius_standalone
$ python manage.py runserver

Warning

You should use the development server only locally. While it’s possible to make your site publicly available using the dev server, you should never do that in a production environment.

Running Postorius on Apache with mod_wsgi

Note

This guide assumes that you know how to setup a VirtualHost with Apache. If you are using SQLite, the .db file as well as its folder need to be writable by the web server.

These settings need to be added to your Apache VirtualHost:

Alias /static /path/to/postorius_standalone/static
<Directory "/path/to/postorius_standalone/static">
    Order deny,allow
    Allow from all
</Directory>

WSGIScriptAlias / /path/to/postorius_standalone/srv/postorius.wsgi
<Directory "/path/to/postorius_standalone/srv">
    Order deny,allow
    Allow from all
</Directory>

The first Alias serves the static files (CSS, JS, Images, etc.). The WSGIScriptAlias serves the Django application. The paths need to be changed depending on which location you downloaded postorius_standalone to.

We’re almost ready. But you need to collect the static files from Postorius (which resides somewhere on your pythonpath) to be able to serve them from the site directory. All you have to do is to change into the postorius_standalone directory and run:

$ python manage.py collectstatic

After reloading the webserver Postorius should be running!