Installing PyLucene 4 (4.5.1)

Greetings friends!

Here I'm going to show you how to install/setup pylucene 4.x on linux - ubuntu or debian

Why are we installing pylucene 4?

This may be your first time using lucene with Python, or you may be upgrading.  pylucene 4 adds faceting features, and reworks the module structure to be identical to that of lucene 4 itself.  Check out the samples directory after you download the pylucene package for examples of new and existing functionality.

Install PyLucene

Download pylucene from http://lucene.apache.org/pylucene/install.html

Extract the Package:

tar -zxvf pylucene-4.5.1-src.tar.gz

Install openjdk:

sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jdk

Install Apache Ant:

sudo apt-get install ant

Install gnu c++ compiler:

sudo apt-get install g++

Install python dev (python.h) headers:

sudo apt-get install python-dev

Upgrade/install setuptools to 0.7 or higher:

sudo apt-get install pip 

pip install setuptools --upgrade 

Change to the jcc directory:

cd pylucene-4.5.1-1/jcc  (edit to match your extracted directory)

Build and Install JCC:

sudo python setup.py build

sudo python setup.py install 

If all that worked, you're ready to build pylucene!

# cd up to the "pylucene-4.xxx" directory 

cd .. 

Edit the file named "Makefile" located at the root of the pylucene-4.5.1 directory you just extracted

# Locate this line

# Linux     (Ubuntu 11.10 64-bit, Python 2.7.2, OpenJDK 1.7, setuptools 0.6.16)

Uncomment lines in the Makefile as shown (if you are on linux):

Issue make and install command:

make 

sudo make install  

 Test the installation:

# open a python interpreter 

python 

# now at the prompt type... 

import lucene 

lucene.initVM()

 If no exceptions are raised you're done!  You've now installed PyLucene 4 !

Troubleshooting Errors

Error:

Traceback (most recent call last):  File "setup.py", line 418, in
    main('--debug' in sys.argv)  File "setup.py", line 363, in main    raise type(e), "%s: %s" %(e, args)OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: ['javac', '-d', 'jcc/classes', 'java/org/apache/jcc/PythonVM.java', 'java/org/apache/jcc/PythonException.java']

Solution:

What this error is really telling us is it couldn't find "javac" ... This is a program provided by the debian/ubuntu package "openjdk-7-jdk" Install this package and try again.

Error:

jcc/sources/jcc.cpp:18:17: fatal error: jni.h: No such file or directory #include
                 ^compilation terminated.

Solution:

This error happens when the sources path can't be found for  your jdk (or JRE)... or you have the wrong jdk installed. If you get this error it means you are using a jdk that the installer isn't looking for.  Open pylucene-4.5.1-1/jcc/setup.py with a text editor.  Look for a line similar to this: 

    'linux2': '/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64',

Whatever the value of the JDK here is.. is the one you need installed.  In my case "openjdk-7-jdk"

Error:

*** ANT is not defined, please edit Makefile as required at top. Stop.

Solution:

This means you didn't edit a section of the file named Makefile to uncomment the variables needed to run the makefile.