Installation

Currently there are no pre-built packages but you can easily install Benji with pip. Furthermore there are two Docker images which each contain a complete Benji installation. The benji image is the easiest and fastest way to test Benji but can also be used in production. See section Containerised Benji for more information about the images.

Ubuntu 16.04

This version of Ubuntu doesn’t have a current Python installation. But Python 3 can be installed via private repository:

apt-get update
apt-get install --no-install-recommends software-properties-common python-software-properties
add-apt-repository ppa:deadsnakes/ppa
apt-get update
apt-get --no-install-recommends python3.6 python3.6-venv python3.6-dev git gcc

Note

For more information about this Personal Package Archive (PPA) please see https://launchpad.net/~deadsnakes/+archive/ubuntu/ppa.

CentOS 7

As with Ubuntu you need to install a recent Python version from a third-party repository:

yum install -y https://centos7.iuscommunity.org/ius-release.rpm
yum install -y python36u-devel python36u-pip python36u-libs python36u-setuptools

Redhat Enterprise Linux 7

Almost the some procedure as on CentOS:

yum install -y https://rhel7.iuscommunity.org/ius-release.rpm
yum install -y python36u-devel python36u-pip python36u-libs python36u-setuptools

Note

For more information about the IOS Community Project please see https://ius.io/.

Common to All Distributions

After installing a recent Python version, it is now time to install Benji and its dependencies:

# Create new virtual environment
python3.6 -m venv /usr/local/benji
# Activate it (your shell prompt should change)
. /usr/local/benji/bin/activate
# Let's upgrade pip first
pip install --upgrade pip
# And now install Benji and its dependencies
pip install --process-dependency-links 'git+https://github.com/elemental-lf/benji'

Note

aes_keywrap is available on PyPI, but the version there isn’t compatible with Python 3. The source repository contains the necessary changes. The option --process-dependency-links is necessary to allow PIP to fetch this external dependency.

If you want to use certain features of Benji you need to install additional dependencies:

  • s3: AWS S3 data backend support
  • b2: Backblaze’s B2 Cloud data backend support
  • encryption: Encryption support
  • compression: Compression support
  • readcache: Disk caching support

You can do this be specifying a comma delimited list of extra features in square brackets after the package URL:

pip install --process-dependency-links 'git+https://github.com/elemental-lf/benji[encryption,compression,s3,readcache,b2]'

To uprgade an existing installation use the same command line but add the --upgrade option.

Note

It is recommended to install and use the compression feature for almost all use cases.