2. Installation and Setup¶

We make available pre-built Windows binaries. On other platforms you can build it from source using distutils. pyRXP is a single extension module with no other dependencies outside Python itself.

2.1 Installing from PyPI¶

The easiest way to install pyRXP is by using the package on PyPI:

pip install pyRXP

2.2 Source Code installation¶

If you’d rather install from source code (available under the GPL), you can find it as a Mercurial repository on BitBucket:

hg clone https://bitbucket.org/rptlab/pyrxp
cd pyrxp
python setup.py install

2.2.1 Post installation tests¶

Whichever method you used to get pyRXP installed, you should run the short test suite to make sure there haven’t been any problems.

Cd to the test directory and run the file testRXPbasic.py.

Running the test program should result in a message like this:

> python testRXPbasic.py
........................................
............
52 tests, no failures!

These are basic health checks, which are the minimum required to make sure that nothing drastic is wrong. This is the very least that you should do - you should not skip this step!

If you want to be more thorough, there is a much more comprehensive test suite which tests XML compliance. This is run by a file called test_xmltestsuite.py, also in the test directory. This depends on a set of more than 300 tests written by James Clark which you can download in the form of a zip file from

http://www.reportlab.com/ftp/xmltest.zip

or

ftp://ftp.jclark.com/pub/xml/xmltest.zip

You can simply drop this in the test directory and run the test_xmltestsuite file which will automatically unpack and use it.

2.3 Windows binary - pyRXP.pyd¶

ReportLab’s FTP server has win32-dlls and amd64-dlls directories, both of which are sub-divided into Python versions, where you’ll find the suitable pyd file. So, assuming you use Python 2.7 on a 64-bit Windows machine, the file you need to download is:

http://www.reportlab.com/ftp/amd64-dlls/2.7/pyRXP.pyd

Download the pyRXP DLL from the ReportLab FTP site. Save the pyRXP.pyd in the DLLs directory under your Python installation (eg this is the C:\Python27\DLLs directory for a standard Windows installation of Python 2.7).

2.4 Examples¶

If you installed pyRXP from source you’ll find an examples directory, which includes a couple of substantial XML files with DTDs, a wrapper module called xmlutils which provides easy access to the tuple tree, and a simple benchmarking script, both documented in section 4.

Note for Windows users:

If you only installed the DLL, you can download the examples from

http://www.reportlab.com/ftp/pyrxp_examples.zip