In the previous post, I covered installation of Git, PostgreSQL and Python under Windows in order to set up a Pyrseas testing and development environment. Today, we’ll explore installation of the Python dependencies.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Python recommends first downloading and running the distribute_setup.py script. This gives you the easy_install command but the Guide recommends installing pip (with easy_install pip) and then using pip to install all other modules.
You can use pip to install pyyaml with the following command:
pip install pyyaml
However, if you try pip install psycopg2 (or even easy_install psycopg2), it’s very likely you’ll see the error:
error: Unable to find vcvarsall.bat
As best as I’ve been able to determine the only way to get around this is by installing Microsoft Visual Express Studio. According to this email and this post, for Python 2.7, it must be the 2008 Express Studio which, to make things interesting, is no longer available from the download links given. If you search enough you may find it here (download vcsetup.exe). After installing VC++ 2008 Express (and if you haven’t installed Strawberry Perl—a later installment in our saga), the pip install psycopg2 command should succeed.
However, if you try to import psycopg2 at the Python 2.7 prompt you may be surprised with a traceback ending in:
from psycopg2._psycopg import BINARY, NUMBER, STRING, DATETIME, ROWID ImportError: DLL load failed: The specified module could not be found.
Ahh … the mysteries of Windows DLLs. Don’t despair: this probably means you don’t have the PostgreSQL DLLs (libpq.dll in particular) in your PATH. Add one of the postgres\x.x\bin directories to your PATH and (hopefully) you should then be able to connect from Python 2.7 to your PostgreSQL installations.
OK, let’s turn our attention to Python 3.2. If you followed the Hitchhiker’s Guide instructions previously and added C:\Python27 to your PATH, you’ll now have to change that to C:\Python32. Suggestion: create a couple of batch scripts, e.g., env27.bat and env32.bat, so you can easily switch between the two Python installations. And don’t forget to add the postgres\x.x\bin directory as well.
For 3.2, once again run the distribute_setup.py script, easy_install pip, and pip install pyyaml, as for 2.7 above. Then you can run pip install psycopg2, and if you installed VC++ previously, the gods may smile upon you and you may see the following message:
Successfully installed psycopg2 Cleaning up...
At this point, if you followed along, you’ll have four versions of PostgreSQL (8.4 through 9.2), two versions of Python (2.7 and 3.2), each with PyYAML and psycopg2, ready for testing. If you’re anxious to check things out, invoke one of the PATH setup scripts and try the following, from the Pyrseas source directory:
set PYTHONPATH=%USERPROFILE%\src\Pyrseas C:\...\src\Pyrseas>python tests\dbobject\test_schema.py ............ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ran 12 tests in 1.452s OK
There are some alternatives to installing psycopg2 using pip and VC++ 2008. I’ll cover those in a subsequent post.
Filed under: PostgreSQL, Python
