Installation of Lamson

The Lamson documentation covers how to install Lamson. But we are not going to discuss this very deeply. We'll just use a virtualenv to install it.:

$ virtualenv lamson_env
$ cd lamson_env
$ source bin/activate
$ pip install lamson

Now let's create a lamson app named ticket-creator that will house the e-mail application.:

$ lamson gen -project ticket-creator
$ cd ticket-creator
$ ls ticket-creator
app  config  logs  muttrc  README  run  tests

Lamson creates files for us to make code organization very easy. Let us next look at the functionality of the files:

$ ls app/
data  handlers  __init__.py  model  templates

The app directory holds all the logic for the e-mail application. Right from the models (models), the views (templates) and controllers (handlers), it houses them all! Doesn't this method of organizing the code look similar? Yes, it is an MVC based e-mail app framework!:

$ ls config
boot.py  __init__.py  logging.conf  settings.py  testing.py  test_logging.conf

The boot.py contains the config attributes that is loaded when lamson starts. Most likely, you wouldn't have to touch this file. The settings.py holds all the configuration attributes. This file is analogous to the django settings and is just a plain python file. The testing.py is equivalent to boot.py but is used in test mode. The logging.conf and test_logging.conf hold all the logging related attributes.

The logs directory holds the files where the logging outputs are redirected. To debug your server, this is the place you've to start off. The muttrc file holds the mutt configuration directives to use lamson to send mail and open a local mailbox. The run directory holds the pid and other runtime specific files. The tests directory houses all the test cases you might write while developing your e-mail application.

For this session, let's close with starting the lamson server. In the e-mail app:

$ lamson start
$ ls run
smtp.pid undeliverable
$ ps aux|grep lamson
theju 10155 0.2 0.1 21768 7532 ? Sl 19:19 0:00 /home/theju/lamson_env/bin/python /home/theju/lamson_env/bin/lamson start

To see on which port lamson is running, or to modify the port, we can change the port of the receiver_config attribute in the config/settings.py file. To stop lamson, just type:

$ lamson stop
Stopping processes with the following PID files: ['./run/smtp.pid']
Attempting to stop lamson at pid 10155

This is the end of the first part where we just dipped our finger nails into this amazing project called Lamson. In the coming post, we are going to see how to write the logic for the application and in the final post on how to deploy this application.