Installation guide

Requirements

Before installing django-admin-tools, you’ll need to have a copy of Django already installed. For the 0.5 release, Django 1.3 or newer is required.

For further information, consult the Django download page, which offers convenient packaged downloads and installation instructions.

Note

If you want to display feeds in the admin dashboard, using the FeedDashboardModule you need to install the Universal Feed Parser module.

Installing django-admin-tools

There are several ways to install django-admin-tools:

  • Automatically, via a package manager.
  • Manually, by downloading a copy of the release package and installing it yourself.
  • Manually, by performing a Mercurial checkout of the latest code.

It is also highly recommended that you learn to use virtualenv for development and deployment of Python software; virtualenv provides isolated Python environments into which collections of software (e.g., a copy of Django, and the necessary settings and applications for deploying a site) can be installed, without conflicting with other installed software. This makes installation, testing, management and deployment far simpler than traditional site-wide installation of Python packages.

Automatic installation via a package manager

Several automatic package-installation tools are available for Python; the most popular are easy_install and pip. Either can be used to install django-admin-tools.

Using easy_install, type:

easy_install -Z django-admin-tools

Note that the -Z flag is required, to tell easy_install not to create a zipped package; zipped packages prevent certain features of Django from working properly.

Using pip, type:

pip install django-admin-tools

It is also possible that your operating system distributor provides a packaged version of django-admin-tools. Consult your operating system’s package list for details, but be aware that third-party distributions may be providing older versions of django-admin-tools, and so you should consult the documentation which comes with your operating system’s package.

Manual installation from a downloaded package

If you prefer not to use an automated package installer, you can download a copy of django-admin-tools and install it manually. The latest release package can be downloaded from django-admin-tools’s listing on the Python Package Index.

Once you’ve downloaded the package, unpack it (on most operating systems, simply double-click; alternately, type tar zxvf django-admin-tools-X-Y-Z.tar.gz at a command line on Linux, Mac OS X or other Unix-like systems). This will create the directory django-admin-tools-X-Y-Z, which contains the setup.py installation script. From a command line in that directory, type:

python setup.py install

Note

On some systems you may need to execute this with administrative privileges (e.g., sudo python setup.py install).

Manual installation from a Mercurial checkout

If you’d like to try out the latest in-development code, you can obtain it from the django-admin-tools repository, which is hosted at Bitbucket and uses Mercurial for version control. To obtain the latest code and documentation, you’ll need to have Mercurial installed, at which point you can type:

hg clone http://bitbucket.org/izi/django-admin-tools/

This will create a copy of the django-admin-tools Mercurial repository on your computer; you can then add the django-admin-tools directory to your Python import path, or use the setup.py script to install as a package.