Installation
You can install ricecooker
by running the command pip install ricecooker
,
which will install the Python package and all its Python dependencies.
You’ll need version 3.5 or higher of Python to use the ricecooker
framework,
as well as some software for media file conversions (ffmpeg
and poppler
).
In the next fifteen minutes or so, we’ll setup your computer with all these things so you can get started writing your first content integration scripts.
System prerequisites
The first step will will be to make sure you have python3
installed on your
computer and two additional file conversion tools: ffmpeg
for video compression,
and the poppler
library for manipulating PDFs.
Jump to the specific instructions for your operating system, and be sure to try the Checklist commands to know the installation was successful.
Linux
On a Debian or Ubuntu GNU/Linux, you can install the necessary packages using:
sudo apt-get install git python3 ffmpeg poppler-utils
You may need to adjust the package names for other Linux distributions (ContOS/Fedora/OpenSuSE).
Checklist: verify your python version is 3.5 or higher by running python3 --version
.
If no python3
command exists, then try python --version
.
Run the commands ffmpeg -h
and pdftoppm -h
to make sure they are available.
Mac
Mac OS X users can install the necessary software using Homebrew:
brew install git python3 ffmpeg poppler
Checklist: verify you python version is 3.5 or higher by running python3 --version
.
Also run the commands ffmpeg -h
and pdftoppm -h
to make sure they are available.
Windows
On windows the process is a little longer since we’ll have to download and install
several programs and make sure their bin
-directories are added to the Path
variable:
Download Python from https://www.python.org/downloads/windows/. Look under the Python 3.7.x heading and choose the “Windows x86-64 executable installer” option to download the latest installer and follow usual installation steps. During the installation, make sure to check the box “Add Python 3.7 to path”.
Checklist: after installation, open a new command prompt (
cmd.exe
) and type inpython --version
andpip --version
to make sure the commands are available.
Download
ffmpeg
from https://github.com/BtbN/FFmpeg-Builds/releases/download/latest/ffmpeg-master-latest-win64-gpl.zip. Extract the zip file to a permanent location where you store your code, likeC:\Users\User\Tools
for example. Next, you must add thebin
folder that containsffmpeg
(e.g.C:\Users\User\Tools\ffmpeg-4.1.4-win64-static\bin
) to your user Path variable following these instructions.Checklist: Open a new command prompt and type in
ffmpeg -h
andffprobe -h
to verify the commandsffmpeg
andffprobe
are available on your Path.
Download the file linked under “Latest binary” from poppler-windows. You will need to download and install 7-zip to “unzip” the
.7z
archive. Extract the file to a some permanent location in your files. Add thebin
folderpoppler-0.xx.y\bin
to your Path variable.Checklist: after installation, open a command terminal and type in
pdftoppm -h
to make sure the commandpdftoppm
is available.
We recommend you also download and install Git from https://git-scm.com/downloads. Using git is not a requirement for the getting started, but it’s a great tool to have for borrowing code from others and sharing back your own code on the web.
If you find the text descriptions to be confusing, you can watch this video walkthrough that shows the installation steps and also explains the adding-to-Path process.
Installing Ricecooker
To install the ricecooker
package, simply run this command in a command prompt:
pip install ricecooker
You will see lots of lines scroll on the screen as pip
, the package installer for Python,
installs all the Python packages required to create content integration scripts.
Reporting issues: If you run into problems or encounter an error in any of the above steps, please let us know by opening an issue on github.
Okay so now we have all the system software and Python libraries installed. Let’s get started!