1. Installing Py4J

1.1. Installing Python 2.6+

Py4J is a library written in Python and Java. Currently, Py4J has been tested with Python 2.6 only. You can install Python by going to the official Python download page.

1.2. Installing Java 6

You also need to install a Java environment, version 6. You can install a Java environment by going to the official Java download page You will need to download the JDK if you plan to use the Java compiler, but you only need the JRE if you are using another compiler, such as the one provided by the Eclipse Development Environment.

1.3. Installing Py4J

There are three ways to install Py4J:

1.3.1. Using easy_install

1. Run easy_install Py4J (don’t forget to prefix with sudo if you install Py4J system-wide on a *NIX operating system).
2. Py4J should now be in your PYTHONPATH.
3. The Py4J Java library is located in the egg file under the name py4j0.3.jar. Egg files are usually located in the dist-packages or site-packages of your python distribution. For example, on a standard Ubuntu installation, it would be located under /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/Py4J-0.3-py2.6.egg.

1.3.2. Using an official release

1. Download the latest official release from SourceForge or from PyPI. If you are using a *NIX OS, download the tar.gz file. If you are using Windows, download the zip file.
2. Untar/Unzip the file and navigate to the newly created directory, e.g., cd Py4J-0.3.
3. Run python setup.py install (don’t forget to prefix with sudo if you install Py4J system-wide).
4. Py4J should now be in your PYTHONPATH.
5. The Py4J Java library is located under Py4J-0.3/py4j-java/py4j0.3.jar. Add this library to your classpath when using Py4J in a Java program.

1.3.3. Using the latest development source code

We will provide detailed instructions to build Py4J in future releases. Briefly, you need:

1. Subversion to download the latest source code. Execute the command line svn co https://py4j.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/py4j/trunk py4j to download the source code.
2. Apache ant to build the Py4J Java library. Just execute the command line ant jar in the py4j-java project directory to build the code and create a jar file.
3. Sphinx to build the documentation. Just execute the command line make html in the py4j-web project.
4. Paver to build the Py4J Python library. Execute the command line paver big_release in the py4j-python directory to create a tar.gz source distribution and an egg file. The big_release target will also create the jar file and the documentation and will add them to the source distribution. This means that you need ant and Sphinx to build the Py4J Python library.