Buildbot and Buildslave are installed using the standard python
distutils process. For either component, after unpacking the tarball,
the process is:
python setup.py build
python setup.py install
where the install step may need to be done as root. This will put the bulk of
the code in somewhere like /usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/buildbot. It
will also install the buildbot command-line tool in
/usr/bin/buildbot.
If the environment variable $NO_INSTALL_REQS is set to '1', then
setup.py will not try to install Buildbot's requirements. This is
usually only useful when building a Buildbot package.
To test this, shift to a different directory (like /tmp), and run:
buildbot --version
# or
buildslave --version
If it shows you the versions of Buildbot and Twisted, the install went
ok. If it says no such command or it gets an ImportError
when it tries to load the libaries, then something went wrong.
pydoc buildbot is another useful diagnostic tool.
Windows users will find these files in other places. You will need to
make sure that python can find the libraries, and will probably find
it convenient to have buildbot on your PATH.
If you wish, you can run the buildbot unit test suite like this:
PYTHONPATH=. trial buildbot.test
# or
PYTHONPATH=. trial buildslave.test
Nothing should fail, a few might be skipped. If any of the tests fail, you should stop and investigate the cause before continuing the installation process, as it will probably be easier to track down the bug early.
If you cannot or do not wish to install the buildbot into a site-wide location like /usr or /usr/local, you can also install it into the account's home directory or any other location using a tool like virtualenv.