lbry-sdk

Installing LBRY

If only the JSON-RPC API server is needed, the recommended way to install LBRY is to use a pre-built binary. We provide binaries for all major operating systems. See the README!

These instructions are for installing LBRY from source, which is recommended if you are interested in doing development work or LBRY is not available on your operating system (godspeed, TempleOS users).

Here’s a video walkthrough of this setup, which is itself hosted by the LBRY network and provided via spee.ch: Setup for development

Prerequisites

Running lbrynet from source requires Python 3.7. Get the installer for your OS here.

After installing Python 3.7, you’ll need to install some additional libraries depending on your operating system.

Because of issue #2769 at the moment the lbrynet daemon will only work correctly with Python 3.7. If Python 3.8+ is used, the daemon will start but the RPC server may not accept messages, returning the following:

Could not connect to daemon. Are you sure it's running?

macOS

macOS users will need to install xcode command line tools and homebrew.

These environment variables also need to be set:

PYTHONUNBUFFERED=1
EVENT_NOKQUEUE=1

Remaining dependencies can then be installed by running:

brew install python protobuf

Assistance installing Python3: https://docs.python-guide.org/starting/install3/osx/.

Linux

On Ubuntu (we recommend 18.04 or 20.04), install the following:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:deadsnakes/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential python3.7 python3.7-dev git python3.7-venv libssl-dev python-protobuf

The deadsnakes PPA provides Python 3.7 for those Ubuntu distributions that no longer have it in their official repositories.

On Raspbian, you will also need to install python-pyparsing.

If you’re running another Linux distro, install the equivalent of the above packages for your system.

Installation

Linux/Mac

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/lbryio/lbry-sdk.git
cd lbry-sdk

Create a Python virtual environment for lbry-sdk:

python3.7 -m venv lbry-venv

Activate virtual environment:

source lbry-venv/bin/activate

Make sure you’re on Python 3.7+ as default in the virtual environment:

python --version

Install packages:

make install

If you are on Linux and using PyCharm, generates initial configs:

make idea

To verify your installation, which lbrynet should return a path inside of the lbry-venv folder.

(lbry-venv) $ which lbrynet
/opt/lbry-sdk/lbry-venv/bin/lbrynet

To exit the virtual environment simply use the command deactivate.

Windows

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/lbryio/lbry-sdk.git
cd lbry-sdk

Create a Python virtual environment for lbry-sdk:

python -m venv lbry-venv

Activate virtual environment:

lbry-venv\Scripts\activate

Install packages:

pip install -e .

Run the tests

Elasticsearch

For running integration tests, Elasticsearch is required to be available at localhost:9200/

The easiest way to start it is using docker with:

make elastic-docker

Alternative installation methods are available at Elasticsearch website.

To run the unit and integration tests from the repo directory:

python -m unittest discover tests.unit
python -m unittest discover tests.integration

Usage

To start the API server:

lbrynet start

Whenever the code inside lbry-sdk/lbry is modified we should run make install to recompile the lbrynet executable with the newest code.

Development

When developing, remember to enter the environment, and if you wish start the server interactively.

$ source lbry-venv/bin/activate

(lbry-venv) $ python lbry/extras/cli.py start

Parameters can be passed in the same way.

(lbry-venv) $ python lbry/extras/cli.py wallet balance

If a Python debugger (pdb or ipdb) is installed we can also start it in this way, set up break points, and step through the code.

(lbry-venv) $ pip install ipdb

(lbry-venv) $ ipdb lbry/extras/cli.py

Happy hacking!