Installing Crystal

What is it?

Crystal is the new web backend for Bongo. It provides a simplified API and is much more modular in design. It is invisaged that different services can be hosted using the same core backend code (for example, AJAX frontend, admin).

Crystal is released under the MIT/X11 license.

Installing dependencies

You will need:

• Werkzeug (latest stable version should work; cloning from Hg head is probably nicer however). Note that this may have its own internal dependencies.

• Python 2.4+. Note that if you're running 2.4, you will still need to install python-wsgiref as a separate package to run the internal webserver.

• SimpleJSON.

Optionally, you may also want the Bongo store installed.

Ubuntu

The following commands should install the required base dependencies to run Crystal:

 $ sudo apt-get install python-simplejson python2.5 python-setuptools
 $ sudo easy_install Werkzeug

Getting sources

To get the latest version of Crystal, simply to a SVN checkout:

$ svn co http://svn.gna.org/svn/bongo/experiments/crystal crystal

Running

$ cd crystal/
$ ./run-crystal.py

and head over to http://localhost:8080 to see your installation working!

You can also just use the sample data provided in demodata by disabling store altogether:

$ ./run-crystal.py --disable-store

More exciting things

You'll probably want to install Avocado then! Note that at the moment it currently depends on Crystal's Dragonfly module, but in the future it should work with any Dragonfly server.