Download and Installation

As of the 3.0 release, KARL is relatively straightforward for both developers and evaluators to download and install. In particular, there is no installation for Windows. See the FAQ for an explanation and suggestion.

Note

Note: The most up-to-date installation information is in the developer installation page and the README.txt that comes in the software.

Prerequisites for Evaluation

To get KARL running quickly as an evaluation, you can skip many of the steps used in deployment. Before getting started, make sure you have the following setup.

  1. Python 2.5.x. While you can use a Python package installed by your system, we HIGHLY recommend that you build your own Python. Make sure you include SSL support in the Python.
  2. Subversion. You need a way to check out the KARL software from the repository and keep it up to date.
  3. virtualenv (optional but recommended). Use Python’s easy_install to install virtualenv and isolate it from changes in your Python configuration.
  4. Converters (optional but recommended). Indexing content in PDF, Word, etc. requires some add-on packages. Look in the software’s README.txt for more detail. This is optional and can be done after an installation of KARL.

Installation for the Impatient

Want to see what’s involved before reading the developer installation instructions or the README.txt? Here are the immediate steps to get a running KARL.

  1. svn co http://osi.agendaless.com/bfgsvn/karlsample/trunk/ karl3
  2. cd karl3
  3. /path/to/your/python/bin/virtualenv --no-site-packages .
  4. bin/python ./bootstrap.py
  5. bin/buildout -U
  6. Wait a number of minutes while lots of work is done.
  7. bin/supervisord
  8. Visit in your browser: http://localhost:6543/ and login as username admin and password admin
  9. When finished: bin/supverisorctl shutdown

Much more detail, along with a number of options for starting KARL, stopping KARL, and working productively are detailed in the README.txt in your top-level karl3 directory.