My Askbot initialisation snafus

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Not a question, but I'm posting it here anyway because it may be of some use to people. I'm running under Ubuntu.

1) No db dependencies given.

This could be intentional, since askbot is designed to work with multiple back ends and it's left to the deployer to decide which one to use. However it could/should be made clear that the deployer needs to sort out db installation themselves.

I got all the way to syncdb stage and got an import error for psycopg2. Then I got an error where the script (or probably psycopg2) was looking for pg_config.

Solution:

$sudo apt-get install postgresql
$sudo apt-get install libpq-dev
$sudo apt-get install python-psycopg2

2) db management system selection should be offered. Defaults explicitly stated.

It took me a little while to figure out that Askbot defaults to using postgresql. Offering the user a choice of backend during askbot-setup, and stating (during askbot-setup) what is going to be used would avoid this bump in the road. Tests for db package installation and db connection would also probably be useful.

3) Database and User (role) not created after running askbot-setup

After installing postgresql and pyscopg2 I ran into this error:

SomeError: psycopg2 role '<name>' does not exist

and once that was fixed:

SomeError: pyscopg2 database '<dbname>' does not exist

I followed the instructions here to create the role and db table. But this should have been done as part of the setup script right?

Anyway, maybe it would be useful if the script checked that any db creation it attempts has actually worked.