Installation

System Requirements

pycsw requires the following supporting libraries:

• lxml (version >= 2.2.3) for XML support
• SQLAlchemy (version >= 0.0.5) for database bindings
• Shapely (version >= 1.2.8) for spatial query / geometry support
• pyproj (version >= 1.8.9) for coordinate transformations

Installing from Source

Download the latest version or fetch svn trunk:

$ svn co https://pycsw.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/pycsw pycsw

Ensure that CGI is enabled for your install directory. For example, on Apache, if you setup pycsw in /srv/www/htdocs/pycsw (where your URL will be http://host/pycsw/csw.py), add the following to httpd.conf:

<Location /pycsw/>
 Options FollowSymLinks +ExecCGI
 Allow from all
 AddHandler cgi-script .py
</Location>

Note

If you install pycsw in cgi-bin, this should work as expected. In this case, the tester application must be moved to a normal location to serve static HTML documents.

Installing from OpenSUSE Build Service

In order to install the OBS package in openSUSE 12.1, one can run the following commands as user root:

# zypper -ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Application:/Geo/openSUSE_12.1/ GEO
# zypper -ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/languages:/python/openSUSE_12.1/ python
# zypper refresh
# zypper install pycsw

For earlier openSUSE versions change 12.1 with 11.4. For future openSUSE version use Factory.

An alternative method is to use the One-Click Installer.

Installing on Ubuntu/Xubuntu/Kubuntu

In order to install pycsw to an Ubuntu based distribution, one can run the following commands:

# sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gcpp-kalxas/ppa-tzotsos
# sudo apt-get updated
# sudo apt-get install pycsw

An alternative method is to use the OSGeoLive installation script located in pycsw/etc/dist/osgeolive:

# cd pycsw/etc/dist
# sudo ./install_pycsw.sh

The script installs the dependencies (Apache, lxml, sqlalchemy, shapely, pyproj) and then pycsw to /var/www.

Running on Windows

For Windows installs, change the first line of csw.py to:

#!/Python27/python -u

Note

The use of -u is required to properly output gzip-compressed responses.

Security

By default, default.cfg is at the root of the pycsw install. If you have setup pycsw outside your HTTP server’s cgi-bin area, this file could be read. To protect the configuration, you have a couple of options:

• move default.cfg to a non HTTP accessible area, and modify csw.py to point to the updated location
• set your web server to deny access to the configuration. For example, in Apache, add the following to httpd.conf:

<Files ~ "\.(cfg)$">
 order allow,deny
 deny from all
</Files>