Set up the archive ui in five minutes

Note

This document is way out of date. If you have access to the Web, the most recent explanation of setting up a full Mailman 3 system, including Postorius and HyperKitty, is the Development Setup Guide at FedoraHosted. If you must work offline, this document may be of some use, but be careful.

The hyperkitty application aims at providing an interface to visualize and explore Mailman archives.

This is a Django project.

Requirements

  • A mail archive in maildir format (no, you don’t need a running Mailman 3!) Eventually hyperkitty will support mbox format for backward compatibility with Pipermail, and zipped maildirs seem like a good idea to save space. Beware: Although you’d think that we would be able to manipulate the venerable mbox format safely and efficiently, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Maildir archives are strongly preferred, because they are more robust to program bugs (whether in Mailman, hyperkitty, or in the originating MUA!)
  • Django is the web framework that supports the UI.
  • bunch DOES WHAT?
  • The notmuch mail indexer is used to generate indexes (and requires Xapian).
  • hyperkitty itself, which is a UI, and not responsible for maintaining the message archive itself. (Since the archive is in maildir format, any modern MTA or MDA can build one for you.)

Get it running (under virtualenv):

It is generally a good idea to use virtualenv to create a stable environment for your Python applications.

  • Create the virtualenv:

    % virtualenv mailman3
    
  • Activate the virtualenv:

    % cd mailman3
    % source bin/activate
    

You don’t have to use virtualenv, though, and if you don’t want to, just omit the preceding steps. Continue with these steps.

  • Install Django and dependencies:

    % easy_install django
    % easy_install bunch
    
  • Install notmuch – these are bindings that come with the notmuch C library. The easiest way is probably to install them for your OS vendor and then symlink them into the virtualenv similar to this:

    % yum install -y python-notmuch
    
  • Note: on a multiarch system like Fedora, the directories may be lib64 rather than lib on 64 bit systems. Next:

    % cd lib/python2.7/site-packages
    % ln -s /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/notmuch .
    
  • Note: this is the version of notmuch I tested with; others may work:

    % ln -s /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/notmuch-0.11-py2.7.egg-info .
    
  • Install the hyperkitty sources:

    % git clone https://github.com/hyperkitty/kittystore.git
    % git clone https://github.com/hyperkitty/hyperkitty.git
    % git clone https://github.com/hyperkitty/hyperkitty_standalone.git
    

Running hyperkitty

  • Start it:

    % cd hyperkitty
    
  • Put the static content where it should be:

    % python manage.py collectstatic
    
  • Run the Django server:

    % python manage.py runserver