coala Installation

This document contains information on how to install coala. Supported platforms are Linux and Windows. coala is known to work on OS X as well. coala is tested against CPython 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5.

In order to run coala you need to install Python. It is recommended, that you install Python3 >= 3.3 from http://www.python.org.

The easiest way to install coala is using pip (Pip Installs Packages). If you don’t already have pip, you can install it like described on https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/installing.html. Note that pip is shipped with recent python versions by default.

System wide installation

The simplest way to install coala is to do it system-wide. But, This is generally discouraged in favor or using a virtualenv.

To install the latest most stable version of coala and supported bears system-wide, use:

$ pip3 install coala-bears

Note

For this and all future steps, some steps require root access (also known as administrative privileges in Windows).

Unix based (Mac, Linux) - This can be achieved by using sudo in front of the command sudo command_name instead of command_name

Windows - The easiest way on windows is to start a command prompt as an administrator and start setup.py.

To install the nightly build from our master branch, you can do:

$ pip3 install coala-bears --pre

To install only coala (without any bears), you can do:

$ pip3 install coala

With --pre you can install the nightly build of the coala base without bears.

Installing inside a virtualenv

Virtualenv is probably what you want to use during development, you’ll probably want to use it there, too. You can read more about it at their documentation - http://virtualenv.readthedocs.org

First, we need to install virtualenv to the system. This can be done with pip3 easily:

pip3 install virtualenv

Once you have virtualenv installed, just fire up a shell and create your own environment. I usually create a project folder and a venv folder:

$ virtualenv venv

Now, whenever you want to work on the project, you only have to activate the corresponding environment.

On Unix based systems (OSX and Linux) this can be done with:

$ source venv/bin/activate

And on Windows this is done with:

$ venv\scripts\activate

Finally, you install coala and supported bears inside the activated virtualenv with:

$ pip3 install coala-bears

Installing coala from source

In order to install coala from source, it is recommended to install git. See http://git-scm.com/ for further information and a downloadable installer or use your package manager on linux to get it.

Note

Again, here it is recommended to install coala inside a virtualenv. This can be done by creating a virtualenv and running the installation commands after the virtualenv has been activated.

After having git installed, you can download the source code of coala with the following command:

git clone https://github.com/coala-analyzer/coala-bears/
cd coala-bears

You can now install coala with a simple:

python3 setup.py install

For the above to work, you may also need to install setuptools which can be installed by running

pip3 install setuptools

You will have coala installed into your python scripts directory. On an unixoid system it is probably already available on your command line globally.

You may also install a development version of coala to test and make changes easily. To do this run:

$ python3 setup.py develop

This essentially lets you install coala in a way that allows you to make changes to the code and see the changes take effect immediately.

Alternate installation

If you want to install coala to an alternate location you can e.g. call python3 setup.py install --prefix=/your/prefix/location. Other options are documented on https://docs.python.org/3.3/install/#alternate-installation.

Note

If you are using a proxy, follow these steps:

  • Set up your system-wide proxy.
  • Use sudo -E pip3 install coala (the -E flag takes the existing environment variables into the sudo environment).

You could also set your pip.conf file to use a proxy, to know more read http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14149422/using-pip-behind-a-proxy for further clarification.

Dependencies

This section lists dependencies of coala that are not automatically installed. On Windows, you can get many with nuget (https://www.nuget.org/), on Mac Homebrew will help you installing dependencies (http://brew.sh/).

JS Dependencies

coala features a lot of bears that use linters written in JavaScript. In order for them to be usable, you need to install them via npm (http://nodejs.org/):

npm install -g jshint alex remark dockerfile_lint csslint coffeelint

If a bear still doesn’t work for you, please make sure that you have a recent version of npm installed. Many linux distributions ship a very old one.

Note

If using coala from source you can just do npm install or npm install -g to use the package.json which is shipped with coala.

Binary Dependencies

Some bears need some dependencies available:

  • PHPLintBear: Install php
  • GNUIndentBear: Install indent (be sure to use GNU Indent, Mac ships a non-GNU version that lacks some functionality.)
  • CSharpLintBear: Install mono-mcs

Clang

coala features some bears that make use of Clang. In order for them to work, you need to install libclang:

  • Ubuntu: apt-get install libclang1
  • Fedora: dnf install clang-libs (Use yum instead of dnf on Fedora 21 or lower.)
  • ArchLinux: pacman -Sy clang
  • Windows: nuget install ClangSharp
  • OSX: brew install llvm --with-clang

If those do not help you, search for a package that contains libclang.so.

On windows, you need to execute this command to add the libclang path to the PATH variable permanently (you need to be an administrator):

setx PATH "%PATH%;%cd%\ClangSharp.XXX\content\x86" \M

For x86 python or for x64 python:

setx PATH "%PATH%;%cd%\ClangSharp.XXX\content\x64" \M

Replace “XXX” with the ClangSharp version you received from nuget.

Generating Documentation

coala documentation can be generated by fetching the documentation requirements. This can be achieved by

pip3 install -r docs-requirements.txt

To generate the documentation coala uses sphinx. Documentation can be generated by running the following command:

python3 setup.py docs

You can then open docs\_build\html\index.html in your favourite browser.

See Writing Documentation for more information.