Port Agent For Antelope

These are suggested instructions using virtualenv. Virtualenv is not required, it's just convenient.

The antelope python packages ship with, and require the use of, the antelope python distribution. This normally lives somewhere like /opt/antelope/python2.7.2. So create the virtual environment something like this:

virtualenv --python=/opt/antelope/5.3/bin/python ve

The antelope library bindings python packages don't live under the antelope python interpreter, but rather somewhere like /opt/antelope/5.3/data/python. Somehow you have to get that on your python path. I like to add a .pth file to ve/lib/python2.7/site-packages which points to the antelope python package dir. Something like:

echo /opt/antelope/5.3/data/python > ve/lib/python2.7/site-packages/antelope5.3.pth

Before activating the virtual environment, source the Antelope environment set up script. This sets up a bunch of important environment variables. (Is this really important?) E.g.:

. /opt/antelope/5.3/setup.sh

Now activate the VE and install the other dependencies. Note that building gevent from source requires cython; you might want to pip install that if it's not already on your system.

. ve/bin/activate
pip install python-daemon
pip install git+git://github.com/ooici/utilities.git#egg=Package
pip install git+git://github.com/surfly/gevent.git@1.0rc2#egg=Package

Now it should be possible to run the port agent.

./port_agent_antelope -c config_test -s

You can test it by sending it a command from another shell:

./port_agent_antelope -c config_test -C ping
RX Packet:  Type: 4, Timestamp: 3577658548.7, Data: bytearray(b'pong. version: port-agent-antelope 0.0.1')

You should see a reply packet with the port agent version number.

The port agent requires that the ANTELOPE_PYTHON_GILRELEASE environment variable bet set so that calls into the Antelope API will not block other Python threads. This is not set by default when you source the Antelope environment script.

The port_agent_antelope wrapper script sets this variable before it executes the port agent program. If you wish to import parts of the port agent into other Python programs or run the tests then you may have to set this variable explicitly in your environment.

export ANTELOPE_PYTHON_GILRELEASE=1

• git
• cython

• git
• virtualenv (system virtualenv OK)
• pip (Comes with virtualenv)

• Antelope 5.3 (Includes Python 2.7 & Antelope Python bindings)
• gevent==1.0dev (1.0rc2)
• greenlet==0.4.0
• lockfile==0.9.1
• python-daemon==1.6
• utilities==2013.05.01 (OOICI utilities)
• PyYAML==3.10
• graypy==0.2.8

These are the versions I developed against. They may not be critical.

gevent is the only dependency that I know requires a particular version, 1.0rc2 from github. Newer version may work as well. Older versions will not as they lack the threadpool module.