Introduction ============ The new installer script written in Python is intended to replace the old installer, written in Perl. It has been implemented to work exactly as the old one, supporting all the same options, etc. Requirements ============ The script should work with both Python v. 2 and 3. It was tested with v. 2.7.16 and v. 3.7.16. Version 3.7 or newer is strongly recommended, since the version 2 has been officially EOL-ed as of Jan. 1 2020. If you have to use Python 2, we intend to maintain backward compatibility, for now, but please use version 2.7 or newer. The extra module psycopg2 (PostgreSQL client) is required. The installer has been tested with psycopg2 version 2.8.4. We recommend that you try installing the "binary", pre-built version of the package: pip install psycopg2-binary (or "pip3 install psycopg2-binary" if you intend to use python3 and it's installed separately on your system) If for whatever reason the binary psycopg2 package doesn't run properly on your system, you can try the more complex process of making pip build it from sources: pip3 install psycopg2 This will require compilers to be properly installed on your system. (On MacOS, you'll need XCode installed). In order to link with the PostgresQL libraries, pip will need to execute pg_config, PostgreSQL configuration utility. Make sure it is in your PATH. If you have multiple versions of PostgresQL installed, make sure the version that you will be using with Dataverse is the first on your PATH. For example, PATH=/usr/pgsql-13/bin:$PATH; export PATH Certain libraries and source include files, both for PostgresQL and Python, are also needed to compile the module. On RedHat/CentOS/etc. you may need to install the -devel packages, *for the specific versions* of PostgreSQL and Python you will be using. For example: yum install postgresql13-devel yum install python37-devel etc. On MacOS, all the needed libraries and source files appear to be included by default with standard distributions of PostgreSQL and Python. Howto ===== Run the new installer script as python install.py or python3 install.py (if python3 is installed separately from the default version 2) If you run into any problems, or have any suggestions, please let us know. Once again, this is still a beta/experimental version. And if getting it to work on your system ends up being too much trouble, there's always an option of going back to the old, default installer.