Platform and dependencies:
Dovetail should work on any Python 2.7 system; if not, please contact the maintainer or file an issue.
Dovetail requires setuptools 0.6.
While Dovetail does not require virtualenv, Dovetail does integrate with it and we strongly recommend this tool.
There are two ways to obtain Dovetail shown below. Unless you want to develop or debug Dovetail, you should choose the Automated/binary install. You need only pick one:
Option 1: Automated (binary) install
Simplest: use:
$ easy_install dovetail
or:
$ pip install dovetail
Option 2: Check out the project
If you like, you could download the source and compile it yourself. The source is on a Mercurial DVCS at Atlassian BitBucket. BitBucket provides several different approaches for download on the site, the simplest being:
$ hg clone https://bitbucket.org/aviser/dovetail
Note
To build, Dovetail requires setuptools. We strongly recommend building in a virtual environment using virtualenv.
After checking out the source, navigate to dovetail/src directory and build:
$ python setup.py install
or:
$ python setup.py develop
After installing, you should be able to execute Dovetail from the command line:
$ dovetail --version
dovetail xxxx http://www.aviser.asia/dovetail
(xxxx will be the version of Formic that you downloaded and installed)
If you checked out the source, you can additionally run the unit tests.
Change directory to the top level directory of the Dovetail source
Run Dovetail against the ‘test’ task:
$ dovetail test
If all goes well, you should see a lot of tests scrolling by. After a minute or so you should see the completed test build message:
===============================================================================
2012-07-27 14:00:17
Task 'build:test' SUCCESS, returning None
Environment:
Hostname: macbook.local
Username: builder
Python: /Users/builder/dovetailenv/bin/python
Working dir: /Users/builder/dovetail
Build file: build.py
Tasks: 98
Elapsed: 60.330s
===============================================================================
Dovetail uses Sphinx for documentation. The source files are in the ‘doc’ subdirectory. To build the documentation, change directory to the Dovetail source:
$ dovetail doc
The documentation will be published in the ./build/doc subdirectory.
Note
Only HTML generation has been tested.
Note
If you get errors that Sphinx cannot import Dovetail’s packages, you may not have installed the module correctly. Try reinstalling it, eg ‘python setup.py develop’ or ‘python setup.py install’