The list of other software that pywws depends on looks frighteningly long at first glance. However, many of these packages won’t be needed by most users. What you need depends on what you want to do with pywws. Remember, it’s a “kit of parts” rather than a monolithic application.
You may be able to install most of these using your operating system’s package manager. This is a lot easier than downloading and compiling source files from the project websites. Note that some Linux distributions use different names for some of the packages, e.g. in Ubuntu, pyusb is called python-usb.
Alternatively, you may be able to install more recent versions of some of the libraries from the Python Package Index (PyPI). I recommend installing pip (the package may be called python-pip) or easy_install. These both simplify installation of software from PyPI. For example, to install PyUSB from PyPI using the pip command:
sudo pip install pyusb
Note: some of these libraries may have their own dependencies that you may need to install. Follow the links to read more about each library’s requirements.
Python 3 is supported, but some things might not work properly. If you find a problem with Python 3, please send a message to the mailing list or submit a bug report on GitHub.
To retrieve data from a weather station pywws needs a python library that allows it to communicate via USB. There is a variety of USB libraries that can be used. Not all of them are available on all computing platforms, which may restrict your choice.
On MacOS X the operating system’s generic hid driver “claims” the weather station, which prevents libusb from working. This restricts Mac users to option 3 or 4.
The pywws-livelog-daemon program runs pywws live logging as a proper UNIX daemon process. It requires the python-daemon library:
The pywws.Plot module uses gnuplot to draw graphs. If you want to produce graphs of weather data, e.g. to include in a web page, you need to install the gnuplot application:
The pywws.Upload module can use “ftp over ssh” (sftp) to upload files to your web-site. Normal uploading just uses Python’s standard modules, but if you want to use sftp you need to install these two modules:
The pywws.ToTwitter module can be used to send weather status messages to Twitter. Posting to Twitter requires these modules:
Changed in version 13.10_r1086: reenabled use of tweepy library as an alternative to python-twitter. python-oauth2 is still required by pywws.TwitterAuth.
Changed in version 13.06_r1023: pywws previously used the tweepy library instead of python-twitter and python-oauth2.
pywws can be configured to use languages other than English, and the documentation can also be translated into other languages. See How to use pywws in another language for more information. The gettext package is required to extract the strings to be translated and compile the translation files.
The documentation of pywws is written in “ReStructured text”. A program called Sphinx is used to convert this easy to write format into HTML for use with a web browser. If you’d like to create a local copy of the documentation (so you don’t have to rely on the online version, or to test a translation you’re working on) you need to install Sphinx.
Comments or questions? Please subscribe to the pywws mailing list http://groups.google.com/group/pywws and let us know.