Installing ReviewBoard on RHEL-5

ReviewBoard is a great free code review tool which we have been using for several years now. We run it on a Redhat server and it is connected to our Subversion repository. With the 1.7 release of ReviewBoard support for Python 2.4 was dropped and unfortunately that is the standard Python on RHEL-5. So I have been putting off upgrading for some time.

Finally decided to upgrade and switch from using the SQLite database to MySQL. Since we have a small team we have not had any performance problems with SQLite, except where the source code in a review is split across multiple pages when changing the page with an open review causes the DB to get locked and requiring a restart of Apache. The ReviewBoard docs do warn about using SQLite but we have been using ReviewBoard since before version 1 when the install process and DB support was not nearly as good as it is now.

So first task was to get a newer Python. Fortunately this turned out to be much easier than expected since the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) contain the rpms for Python 2.6 so it was as easy as

    yum install python26

Now installing ReviewBoard should be extremely easy. On my Fedora box at home, I could just type

    easy_install ReviewBoard

and ReviewBoard and all its dependencies were installed. Trivially easy. Unfortunately the server is behind a proxy server. Setting the http_proxy environment variable and the values in yum.comf were enough to get yum to work, but not easy_install. That kept on giving errors.

After several frustrating hours trying to different proxy server settings I eventually stumbled on the solution: Our proxy server seems to require that https_proxy is set in addition to  http_proxy. So setting both:

   export http_proxy=http://192.168.1.1:80
   export https_proxy=http://192.168.1.1:80

and it installed!  The Google search for easy_install proxy problems never mentioned this. So I don’t know whether this is an easy_install problem or our peculiar proxy server.

Of course, it still wasn’t that easy. While setting up the site MySQL was not available because the install of the pymysql had failed because the MySQL devel package was not installed and there was no error message visible during the easy_install.

However, finally it works. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to migrate the old SQLite data to MySQL.