Developer Installation

We recommend installing Dallinger on Mac OS X. It’s also possible to use Ubuntu, either directly or in a virtual machine. Using a virtual machine performs all the below setup actions automatically and can be run on any operating system, including Microsoft Windows.

Install Python 2.7

You will need Python 2.7. You can check what version of Python you have by running:

python --version

If you do not have Python 2.7 installed, you can install it from the Python website.

Or, if you use Homebrew:

brew install python

Or, if you use Anaconda, install using conda, not Homebrew.

If you have Python 3.x installed and and symlinked to the command python, you will need to create a virtualenv that interprets the code as python2.7. Fortunately, we will be creating a virtual environment anyway, so as long as you run brew install python and you don’t run into any errors because of your symlinks, then you can proceed with the instructions. If you do run into any errors, good luck, we’re rooting for you.

Install Postgres

On OS X, we recommend installing to start and stop a Postgres server. You’ll also want to set up the Postgres command-line utilities by following the instructions here.

You will then need to add Postgres to your PATH environmental variable. If you use the default location for installing applications on OS X (namely /Applications), you can adjust your path by running the following command:

export PATH="$PATH:/Applications/"

NB: If you have installed an older version of Postgres (e.g., < 9.5), you may need to alter that command to accommodate the more recent version number. To double check which version to include, run:

ls /Applications/

Whatever values that returns are the versions that you should place in the export command above in the place of latest.

If it does not return a number, you have not installed Postgres correctly in your /Applications folder or something else is horribly wrong.

On Ubuntu, follow the instructions under the heading “Installation” here.

Create the Database

After installing Postgres, you will need to create a database for your experiments to use. First, open the Then, run the following command from the command line:

psql -c 'create database dallinger;' -U postgres

If you get the following error...

    Is the server running locally and accepting

...then you probably did not start the app.

If you get the following error...

    Referenced from: /usr/local/bin/psql
    Reason: image not found
Abort trap: 6

... then type the following command into the command line:

createdb -U postgres dallinger

(This error may arise if you are running Python 2.7 with Anaconda within a virtual environment.)

Set up a virtual environment

Note: if you are using Anaconda, ignore this virtualenv section; use conda to create your virtual environment. Or, see the special Anaconda installation instructions.

Set up a virtual environment by running the following commands:

pip install virtualenv
pip install virtualenvwrapper
export WORKON_HOME=$HOME/.virtualenvs
mkdir -p $WORKON_HOME
source $(which
mkvirtualenv dallinger --python /usr/local/bin/python2.7

These commands use pip, the Python package manager, to install two packages virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper. They set up an environmental variable named WORKON_HOME with a string that gives a path to a subfolder of your home directory (~) called Envs, which the next command (mkdir) then makes according to the path described in $WORKON_HOME (recursively, due to the -p flag). That is where your environments will be stored. The source command will run the command that follows, which in this case locates the shell script, the contents of which are beyond the scope of this setup tutorial. If you want to know what it does, a more in depth description can be found on the documentation site for virtualenvwrapper.

Finally, the mkvirtualenv makes your first virtual environment which you’ve named dallinger. We have explicitly passed it the location of python2.7 so that even if your python command has been remapped to python3, it will create the environment with python2.7 as its interpreter.

In the future, you can work on your virtual environment by running:

source $(which
workon dallinger

NB: To stop working on the virtual environment, run deactivate. To list all available virtual environments, run workon with no arguments.

Install prerequisites for building documentation

To be able to build the documentation, you will need:

  • pandoc. Please follow the instructions here to install it.
  • the Enchant library. Please follow the instructions here to install it.

Install Dallinger

Next, navigate to the directory where you want to house your development work on Dallinger. Once there, clone the Git repository using:

git clone

This will create a directory called Dallinger in your current directory.

Change into your the new directory and make sure you are still in your virtual environment before installing the dependencies. If you want to be extra careful, run the command workon dallinger, which will ensure that you are in the right virtual environment.

Note: if you are using Anaconda – as of August 10, 2016 – you will need to follow special Anaconda installation instructions. This should be fixed in future versions.

cd Dallinger

Now we need to install the dependencies using pip:

pip install -r dev-requirements.txt

Next run with the argument develop:

pip install -e .[data]

Test that your installation works by running:

dallinger --version

Note: if you are using Anaconda and get a long traceback here, please see the special Installing Dallinger with Anaconda.

Next, you’ll need access keys for AWS, Heroku, etc..