Installation

Babel is distributed as a standard Python package fully set up with all the dependencies it needs. It primarily depends on the excellent pytz library for timezone handling. To install it you can use easy_install or pip.

virtualenv

Virtualenv is probably what you want to use during development, and if you have shell access to your production machines, you’ll probably want to use it there, too.

If you are on Mac OS X or Linux, chances are that one of the following two commands will work for you:

$ sudo easy_install virtualenv

If you are on Windows and don’t have the easy_install command, you must install it first. Check the pip and distribute on Windows section for more information about how to do that. Once you have it installed, run the same commands as above, but without the sudo prefix.

Once you have virtualenv installed, just fire up a shell and create your own environment. I usually create a project folder and a venv folder within:

$ mkdir myproject
$ cd myproject
$ virtualenv venv
New python executable in venv/bin/python
Installing distribute............done.

Now, whenever you want to work on a project, you only have to activate the corresponding environment. On OS X and Linux, do the following:

$ . venv/bin/activate

If you are a Windows user, the following command is for you:

$ venv\scripts\activate

Either way, you should now be using your virtualenv (notice how the prompt of your shell has changed to show the active environment).

Now you can just enter the following command to get Babel installed in your virtualenv:

$ pip install Babel

A few seconds later and you are good to go.

System-Wide Installation

This is possible as well, though I do not recommend it. Just run pip with root privileges:

$ sudo pip install Babel

If pip is not available on your system you can use easy_install.

(On Windows systems, run it in a command-prompt window with administrator privileges, and leave out sudo.)

Living on the Edge

If you want to work with the latest version of Babel, you will need to use a git checkout.

Get the git checkout in a new virtualenv and run in development mode:

$ git clone http://github.com/mitsuhiko/babel.git
Initialized empty Git repository in ~/dev/babel/.git/
$ cd babel
$ virtualenv venv
New python executable in venv/bin/python
Installing distribute............done.
$ . venv/bin/activate
$ python setup.py import_cldr
$ pip install --editable .
...
Finished processing dependencies for Babel

Make sure to not forget about the import_cldr step because otherwise you will be missing the locale data. This custom command will download the most appropriate CLDR release from the official website and convert it for Babel.

This will pull also in the dependencies and activate the git head as the current version inside the virtualenv. Then all you have to do is run git pull origin to update to the latest version. If the CLDR data changes you will have to re-run python setup.py import_cldr.

pip and distribute on Windows

On Windows, installation of easy_install is a little bit trickier, but still quite easy. The easiest way to do it is to download the distribute_setup.py file and run it. The easiest way to run the file is to open your downloads folder and double-click on the file.

Next, add the easy_install command and other Python scripts to the command search path, by adding your Python installation’s Scripts folder to the PATH environment variable. To do that, right-click on the “Computer” icon on the Desktop or in the Start menu, and choose “Properties”. Then click on “Advanced System settings” (in Windows XP, click on the “Advanced” tab instead). Then click on the “Environment variables” button. Finally, double-click on the “Path” variable in the “System variables” section, and add the path of your Python interpreter’s Scripts folder. Be sure to delimit it from existing values with a semicolon. Assuming you are using Python 2.7 on the default path, add the following value:

;C:\Python27\Scripts

And you are done! To check that it worked, open the Command Prompt and execute easy_install. If you have User Account Control enabled on Windows Vista or Windows 7, it should prompt you for administrator privileges.

Now that you have easy_install, you can use it to install pip:

> easy_install pip