Getting started on Windows
This documentation needs expanding.
If you want to help develop Mailpile by submitting pull requests that would be awesome. We need to create documentation about how to best setup a dev version of Mailpile in Windows.
Download links used to resolve dependencies:
python 2.7: <http://www.python.org/download/>
lxml: <http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#lxml>
pyreadline: <https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyreadline/2.0>
clone Mailpile, docs and plugins (submodules) to your machine
git clone --recursive https://github.com/mailpile/Mailpile.git
This will clone the main development branch of Mailpile. If you want to clone a specific branch, specify it like so:
git clone --recursive -b branchname https://github.com/mailpile/Mailpile.git
A full list of existing branches is available on Github. Generally you'll want the highest version number available.
move into the newly created source repo
cd Mailpile
create a virtual environment directory
python -m pip install virtualenv
python -m virtualenv -p "C:\Python27\python.exe" --system-site-packages mp-virtualenv
activate the virtual Python environment
cmd.exe: "mp-virtualenv\Scripts\activate"
powershell: .\mp-virtualenv\Scripts\activate.ps1
What is virtualenv?
Virtualenv is a tool which allows you to install the Mailpile's Python dependencies locally, without having to modify your operating system's global Python. This keeps things contained and makes it easier to un-install everything all at once. The downside, is you need to activate the virtual environment before you continue setting up Mailpile and always before you run Mailpile. That is what the activate command does.
Important: You must have activated the virtual Python environment in your current shell, as described in step 1 above. If you opened a new shell or a new terminal window, see section 5.1.
If you want to develop Mailpile:
python -m pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
For production or end-users, install everything that's listed in requirements.txt instead.
python -m pip install -r requirements.txt
Also see if pyreadline is installed else run the following command
python -m pip install pyreadline
If all is well, you should now be able to run Mailpile.
You can now run Mailpile directly using the following command to launch a new console -- without start, Mailpile would share stdio with the shell and would fight for input:
start .\mp.cmd