Installing Arches

Installation

Once you have all the dependencies taken care of you are ready to install Arches.

Note

If you are a developer hoping to contribute to the Arches project, please check out Creating a Development Environment.

1. Create and enter a new directory called Projects

mkdir Projects && cd Projects

2. Create a virtual environment called ENV

pip install virtualenv
virtualenv ENV

3. Activate the virtual environment

Linux and macOS:

source ENV/bin/activate

Windows:

ENV\Scripts\activate

When you activate your virtual environment, your command prompt will be prefixed with (ENV). If you need to deactivate it for any reason, run deactivate.

4. Install Arches into your virtual environment

Use the following to get the latest stable release of Arches:

pip install arches --no-binary :all:

Warning

Running a pip installation without the --no-binary :all: argument will install arches in your virtual environment, but will not install all of the separate python packages that you need. This will cause you to not be able to proceed with the following steps.

5. Create a new Arches Project

Now that Arches is installed, you can make a Project. This is where you will make all of the customizations and branding that will make one installation of Arches different from the next. The name of your project should only be lowercase, and should use underscores instead of spaces or hyphens. The example below uses my_project.

Linux and macOS:

arches-project create my_project

Windows:

python ENV\Scripts\arches-project create my_project

Note

You can use the option [{-d|--directory} <directory_name>] to change the directory your new project will be created in.

6. Update settings_local.py

Before you continue, you may need to open my_project\my_project\settings_local.py and change some environment-specific settings.

  • Depending on your Postgres/PostGIS installation, you may need to uncomment the DATABASES section and change the username and password, as well as the name of your PostGIS template database. If you will have multiple Arches projects using the same database, make sure to change the database name here as well.

  • On Windows, you must specify the path to your GDAL library. Add the following line. Be sure to adjust the path as necessary for your GDAL installation, and note the forward slashes:

    GDAL_LIBRARY_PATH = "C:/OSGeo4W64/bin/gdal201.dll"

  • See Arches System Settings for a full rundown of how settings are handled in Arches.

Note

At this point you must install ElasticSearch and make sure it is running before continuing.

7. Setup the database

To begin working with your Project, first enter it:

cd my_project

and then (with ElasticSearch running) run:

python manage.py packages -o setup_db

Note

You may be prompted to enter a password for the postgres user, depending on your OS and how you installed Postgres/Postgis. Generally, our installation scripts set this password to postgis.

8. Run the development server

To confirm things are working, run:

python manage.py runserver

and navigate to localhost:8000 in Chrome.

The default login credentials are ‘admin’ for both username and password. To change this password and create new users, navigate to localhost:8000/admin.

Next steps…

Now that you have Arches installed and a Project created, you are ready to begin.

  • Modify some Initial Configuration settings

  • Read more about Projects and Packages

  • For a quick start that will create an example database schema in your new Arches project (and allow you to begin recording data right away), you can load a sample package with the following command

    python manage.py packages -o load_package -s https://github.com/archesproject/arches4-example-pkg/archive/master.zip -db true

    This example package has a full set of Resource Models, Branches, and Concepts that are generally based on the original Arches HIP Contents.

    Note

    If you get an “invalid package source” error, please download the zipfile (use the url in the command) and run the same command pointing to the location of the downloaded zipfile.

General Troubleshooting

  • On macOS, If you get this error

    Error

    ValueError: –enable-zlib requested but zlib not found, aborting.

    try running xcode-select --install (reference)

  • Getting a connection error like this (in the dev server output or in the browser)

    Error

    ConnectionError: ConnectionError(<urllib3.connection.HTTPConnection object at 0x0000000005C6BC50>: Failed to establish a new connection: [Errno 10061] No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it) caused by: NewConnectionError(<urllib3.connection.HTTPConnection object at 0x0000000005C6BC50>: Failed to establish a new connection: [Errno 10061] No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it)

    means Arches is not able to communicate with ElasticSearch. Most likely, ElasticSearch is just not running, so just start it up and reload the page. If you can confirm that it is running, make sure Arches is pointed to to correct port.

  • Postgres password authentication error

    Error

    django.db.utils.OperationalError: FATAL: pw authentification failed for user postgres

    Most likely you have not correctly set the database credentials in your settings.py file. Many of our install scripts set the db user to postgres and password to postgis, so that’s what Arches looks for by default. However, if you have changed these values (particularly if you are on Windows and had to enter a password during the Postgres/PostGIS installation process), the new values must be reflected in in settings.py or settings_local.py.

    Note

    On Windows, you can avoid having to repeatedly enter the password while running commands in the console by setting the PGPASSWORD environment variable: set PGPASSWORD=<your password>.