Installing the core of WebLab-Deusto is pretty straightforward. It does not have many requirements. However, supporting more features and tuning the performance requires installing more software infrastructure. This section covers only the first steps.


If you’re familiar with Python, git, setuptools and virtualenv, all you need to do (in a virtualenv) is:

pip install git+

And go to the next section. Please note that, given the size of the repository, it’s better if you keep the weblabdeusto git repository downloaded in your computer so you can call git pull to upgrade faster.

Otherwise, please read this section.

Through this tutorial, we’ll go through the most simple deployment possible. It will not require any web server (such as Apache), neither a database engine (such as MySQL). Instead it will use its internal web server and a simple sqlite database. Then, we will explain how to go deep to more complex deployments.

Note: during the whole documentation, some examples of commands run in a terminal will be presented. Given that terminals are different from system to system, we will show $ to represent the terminal prompt. For instance, the following example:

$ weblab-admin --version

The $ will represent C:\something> in Windows environments and user@machine:directory$ in certain UNIX (Linux, Mac OS X) environments. You must not write that. Whenever there is no $ in the beginning of the line (such as 5.0 in the example), is the expected output. Finally, sometimes the output is too long, so [...] is used to declare “a long output will be shown”.

Obtaining WebLab-Deusto

There are two ways to obtain WebLab-Deusto:

  1. Downloading it from github using git. That’s the recommended version, since that allows you to upgrade WebLab-Deusto automatically in the future, and even contribute easily. However, it requires installing git.
  2. Downloading it from github using the web browser. That’s the simplest version, but we do not recommend it (since you lose useful information about the running version and the upgrade process is very complicated). If you still try to use it, go to the github repository and click on the ZIP link. Uncompress the file.
    • Windows users: in certain versions of Microsoft Windows, sometimes there are problems with too-long file paths, so if any problem is reported by your uncompressing program, just make sure that the directory where you are uncompressing WebLab is not very long (for instance, uncompressing it in C:\weblab or C:\Users\Tom\weblab will surely work, whereas downloading it in C:\Users\My full name\Downloads\Other downloads\Yet other downloads\weblabdeusto-long-name might fail).

Installing the requirements

  1. Install Python 2.7:
    • In Linux and Mac OS X, Python is probably installed.
    • In Microsoft Windows, download it from here. Do not download Python 3.x (WebLab-Deusto relies on Python 2.7).
  2. Once installed, put both in the system path:
    • In Linux and Mac OS X, this is probably done by default.
    • In Microsoft Windows, go to Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Environment variables -> (down) PATH -> edit and append: ;C:\Python27\;C:\Python27\Scripts\;.
  3. At this step, you should be able to open a terminal (in Microsoft Windows, click on the Start menu -> run -> type cmd) and test that both tools are installed.

Run the following (don’t take into account the particular versions, these are just examples):

$ python --version

Python 2.7.6


If it reports that it is using a higher version (e.g., 3.5.1), then your system is using by default Python 3 instead of Python 2. At the time of this writing, WebLab-Deusto is incompatible with that version. If this is the case, try running python2.7 to verify that it is installed:

$ python2.7 --version
Python 2.7.6

If it is installed (even if it is not by default), it is fine.

  1. Install setuptools if you don’t have them. In Windows, nowadays the installer of Python comes with pip, so you don’t need to install anything else. In Linux, you usually can install it from the repositories (e.g., sudo apt-get install python-pip in Ubuntu/Debian). If in doubt, follow the instructions.
  2. Install virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper. In Ubuntu/Debian you can use sudo apt-get install virtualenv virtualenvwrapper (and in other Linux distributions this is probably available in the repositories). In Windows run the following:
C:\Users\Tom> pip install virtualenvwrapper-win

In other systems, you may use as an administrator:

$ pip install virtualenv virtualenvwrapper
  1. At this point, you should be able to open a terminal and test that these tools are installed.

Run the following (don’t take into account the particular versions):

$ pip --version


$ virtualenv --version


$ mkvirtualenv --version



virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper are not strictly necessary. If you don’t use them, you can always install WebLab-Deusto at system level (using administrator credentials. So if you get problems that you can not solve when installing virtualenv, do not worry and skip that step.

That said, there are some common problems installing virtualenvwrapper, listed here:

  • mkvirtualenv: command not found: virtualenvwrapper is a bash script, which must be loaded. By default in Ubuntu, it is correctly loaded in all the new terminals, so try closing the current terminal and opening it again. If the problem persists, you may need to find where is a script called, and add to your ~/.bashrc:
source /path/to/
  • Problems in Microsoft Windows Windows with path not found: Check that you have installed virtualenvwrapper-win and not virtualenvwrapper.

If you still have problems with mkvirtualenv, try uninstalling it (pip uninstall virtualenvwrapper) and installing only the virtualenv package. If you do this, you will need to do:

$ virtualenv weblab_env
New python executable in weblab_env/bin/python


Make sure that the virtualenv is in a directory with no spaces. For example, if you have it in a directory such as /Users/Tom/Google Drive/ or C:\Users\Tom\Desktop\My folder, there can be problems with different dependencies of Python. It is safer if you use /Users/user/projects.


If by default your system is using Python 3, then make sure you provide the following parameter:

$ virtualenv --python=/usr/bin/python2.7 weblab_env

And then, each time you want to workin the virtualenv, run:

$ . ./weblab_env/bin/activate
(weblab_env) user@machine:~$

(On Windows)
C:\> .\weblab_env\Scripts\activate
(weblab_env) C:\>

If this also generates problems, you can safely avoid using a virtual environment and install the whole system as administrator:

C:\weblab\> python install

Installing WebLab-Deusto

Create a virtualenv. In Linux/Mac OS X systems:

user@machine:/opt/weblabdeusto$ cd WHEREVER-IS-WEBLAB

(e.g., /opt/weblabdeusto/  Avoid directories with spaces -e.g., /Users/Tom/Google Drive/-)

user@machine:/opt/weblabdeusto$ mkvirtualenv weblab

(weblab) user@machine:/opt/weblabdeusto$



$ mkvirtualenv --python=/usr/bin/python2.7 weblab

In Microsoft Windows environments:


(e.g., C:\weblabdeusto\  Avoid directories with spaces -e.g., C:\Users\Tom\My Projects\-)

C:\weblabdeusto> mkvirtualenv weblab

(weblab) C:\weblabdeusto>

Then, make sure you’re running the latest versions of setuptools and pip:

(weblab) $ pip install --upgrade setuptools
(weblab) $ pip install --upgrade pip

And then, install WebLab-Deusto:

$ python install
Finished processing dependencies for weblabdeusto==5.0

Once the process is over, you can test the installation by running:

$ weblab-admin --version
5.0 - 1ac2e2b03048cf89c8df36c838130212f4ac63d3 (Sunday, October 18, 2015)

If it displays 5.0 or higher, then you have successfully installed the system in that virtual environment. Virtual environments in Python are environments where a set of libraries (with particular versions) are installed. For instance, you may have different virtual environments for different applications relying on different versions of libraries. The long code (i.e., 1ac2e2…) refers to the currently installed version, and then the date of the latest change in the WebLab-Deusto repository. You should upgrade the system from time to time to obtain the latest features.

Whenever you open a new terminal, you’ll find that weblab-admin is not installed. However, whenever you activate the environment where you installed WebLab-Deusto, it will be installed. For instance, if you open a new terminal, do the following in UNIX (Linux, Mac OS X) systems:

user@machine:~$ workon weblab
(weblab) user@machine:~$ weblab-admin --version
5.0 - 1ac2e2b03048cf89c8df36c838130212f4ac63d3 (Sunday, October 18, 2015)

Or the following in Microsoft Windows systems:

C:\Users\John\Desktop> workon weblab
(weblab) C:\Users\John\Desktop> weblab-admin --version
5.0 - 1ac2e2b03048cf89c8df36c838130212f4ac63d3 (Sunday, October 18, 2015)

Now you can continue with the first steps.