Getting started on Linux
Mailpile is developed and tested most heavily on Debian and Debian-based distributions, but should work fine on any modern distribution (Fedora, Mandriva, even Arch if you are so inclined). There may be packages available for your system. If not, consider submitting packages.
Mailpile requires a number of different packages in order to run. Specifically:
- GnuPG (preferably on the 1.x branch for now, as Mailpile doesn't currently act as a GPG Agent)
- OpenSSL
- Python 2.7+
- Lxml
Python 2.7 or newer is standard on virtually all Linux systems now. On Debian, you could install the other packages by running:
sudo apt-get install git gnupg openssl python-virtualenv \
python-pip python-lxml python-dev libjpeg-dev \
python-pgpdump python-cryptography libssl-dev \
python-socks
On Fedora, you could install the other packages by running:
sudo dnf install git gnupg openssl python-virtualenv \
python-pip python-lxml python-devel libjpeg-turbo-devel \
python-pgpdump python-pysocks
This will also install the Python virtual environment and package installer tools, which are optional but recommended.
The following steps assume that you already have virtualenv installed. If not please follow the installation instructions for that first. If you would prefer not to use virtualenv at all and install Mailpile globally (either with or without pip), please see the instructions at the end of the page.
# clone Mailpile, docs and plugins (submodules) to your machine
git clone --recursive https://github.com/mailpile/Mailpile.git
This will clone the main development branch of Mailpile. If you want to clone a specific branch, specify it like so:
git clone --recursive -b branchname https://github.com/mailpile/Mailpile.git
A full list of existing branches is available on Github. Generally you'll want the highest version number available.
# move into the newly created source repo
cd Mailpile
# create a virtual environment directory
virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python2.7 --system-site-packages mp-virtualenv
# activate the virtual Python environment
source mp-virtualenv/bin/activate
source is a built into bash, so you have to use either bash or a bash compatible shell.
Virtualenv is a tool which allows you to install the Mailpile's Python dependencies locally, without having to modify your operating system's global Python. This keeps things contained and makes it easier to un-install everything all at once. The downside, is you need to activate the virtual environment before you continue setting up Mailpile and always before you run Mailpile. That is what the source command does.
Important: You must have activated the virtual Python environment in your current shell, as described in step 1 above. If you opened a new shell or a new terminal window, see section 5.1.
If you want to develop Mailpile:
pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
For production or end-users, install everything that's listed in requirements.txt instead.
pip install -r requirements.txt
If all is well, you should now be able to run Mailpile.
Note: If you have difficulty installing the LXML package, you can try installing a vendor supplied package instead, e.g. by running sudo apt-get install python-lxml, or equivalent. (Some users will need to run sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev before lxml will compile.)
You can now run Mailpile directly using the command:
./mp
This should drop you into the Mailpile shell in the terminal and open up a new tab or window on your default browser that you can use to configure Mailpile and start using it.
If you want to configure Mailpile to launch automatically on startup, consider adding it to either your window system config (if you're running it on a personal computer for instance), or to your init scripts (if you're using Mailpile on a server).
If you want to configure Mailpile to accessed over the internet follow these instructions
Steps 1-5 should get you up and running. However, you don't need to go through the entire process every time you want to run Mailpile. The steps for doing that are as follows:
# enter the Mailpile source directory
cd Mailpile
# activate the Mailpile virtual Python environment
source mp-virtualenv/bin/activate
# run Mailpile
./mp
Other useful commands (from within the Mailpile directory):
# update your Mailpile
git pull
# update any submodules (documentation, plug-ins)
git submodule update
# if you are developing and want a throw-away, blank Mailpile
./scripts/setup-test.sh
# running all the tests
make alltests
# leave the virtual Python environment
deactivate
If you want to use PIP (Python's package manager), you need to install these dependencies first, to enable PIP to run. For Debian...
sudo apt-get install python-dev libxml2-dev libxslt-dev libz-dev python-pip
Then follow the details in step 3 & step 4
If you don't want to use PIP, you need to install these dependencies:
- python-dev
- libxml2-dev
- libxslt-dev
- libz-dev
- python-jinja2
- python-lxml
- python-pgpdump
- python-cryptography
- spambayes
- python-fasteners
(note: see the file requirements.txt for a full list, the above may be out of date)
Debian
You could install these packages like this:
sudo apt-get install python-dev libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev zlib1g-dev python-jinja2 python-lxml python-pgpdump python-cryptography spambayes python-fasteners
Fedora
Using this dnf command might work for installing the dependencies:
sudo dnf install gnupg openssl python-devel libxml2-devel libxslt-devel zlib-devel python-jinja2 python-lxml python-pgpdump python-fasteners
Then follow the details in step 2