Requirements & Installation

Requirements

This is a tool written in Python for Linux environments; currently, Python 2.7 and 3.4 are supported. Windows is not supported at all.

It is based on two RIPE NCC packages: RIPE Atlas Sagan and RIPE Atlas Cousteau, both available on GitHub and PyPI. It also has some other dependencies, they are reported in the setup.py file and managed by the pip installer.

Some libraries need to be compiled and they require a compiler and development libraries for Python.

  • On Debian/Ubuntu the following system packages need to be installed:

    $ sudo apt-get install python-dev libffi-dev libssl-dev
    

    Since pip and virtualenv are also strongly suggested, you may need to install them too:

    $ sudo apt-get install python-virtualenv python-pip
    
  • On CentOS, the following packages are needed:

    $ sudo yum install gcc libffi-devel openssl-devel
    
    $ # for pip and virtualenv:
    $ sudo yum install epel-release
    $ sudo yum install python-pip python-virtualenv
    

Installation

Even if you can manually install it and run it as a system package, pip installation and virtualenv use are strongly recommended to ease installation and dependencies management and to have it running within an isolated environment.

More: pip installation, virtualenv installation.

Setup a virtualenv

Virtualenv usage is documented here, but the following should be enough in most cases:

$ mkdir ripe-atlas-monitor
$ cd ripe-atlas-monitor
$ virtualenv venv
$ source venv/bin/activate

Installation from PyPI

Python pip can install packages both globally (system wide) and on a per-user basis. To avoid conflicts with other packages, the second way is the preferred one. It can be achieved using the virtualenv tool (the preferred way) or passing the --user argument to pip, so that the package will be installed within the $HOME/.local directory.

$ # using virtualenv
$ pip install ripe-atlas-monitor

$ # in your user's local dir
$ pip install --user ripe-atlas-monitor

Installation from GitHub

If you just want to use the latest code on the master branch on GitHub, you can install it with

$ pip install git+https://github.com/pierky/ripe-atlas-monitor.git

“Editable” installation

If you want to contribute to the code, you can clone the repository and install it using the -e argument of pip; you’ll have it installed in a local directory where you can edit it and see the results without having to install it every time:

$ pip install -e git+https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/ripe-atlas-monitor.git#egg=ripe-atlas-monitor

See also: How to contribute.

Bash autocomplete

To enable bash autocomplete, register the ripe-atlas-monitor script and update your shell preferences:

eval "$(register-python-argcomplete ripe-atlas-monitor)"

If you want it to be enabled on every access, you can it to your .bashrc file.