Quickstart Guide

The purpose of this guide is to demonstrate a quick way to install and configure Posterity. For a more complete description of available configuration options please see the configuration section.

Contents

1   Installing Posterity

The easiest way to install all these dependencies is to use easy_install. The following command will download and install the latest version of Posterity along with all dependencies:

$ easy_install Posterity

1.1   Installing the development version

If you're feeling brave and want to test the development version of Posterity You can download and install it with the following commands:

$ svn co http://svn.edgewall.org/repos/posterity/trunk posterity-trunk
$ cd posterity-trunk
$ python setup.py develop

2   Configuration

2.1   Creating a Posterity instance

A Posterity instance is a filesystem directory containing things like configuration file, log files and plugins for a single Posterity instance.

Almost all posterity-admin commands needs to have an instance directory specified in order to know which instance to work on. This can be done using either the --instance= command line option or by setting the the POSTERITY_INSTANCE environment variable. For this quickstart guide we'll use the latter approach and points the environment variable to the location of our soon to be created Posterity instance:

export POSTERITY_INSTANCE=/path/to/instance   On Unix
set POSTERITY_INSTANCE=/path/to/instance      On Windows

The next step is to create the instance directory and to initialize the database that will contain the actual mail data. The actual database connection string to use depends on the database server but will look something like this:

posterity-admin init --database=postgres:///mydatabase
posterity-admin init --database=mysql://user@server/mydatabase

In theory any SQLAlchemy supported database with transaction and foreign key support should work but Posterity is currently only regularly tested with PostgreSQL and MySQL.

The next command will create an email account and set a password:

posterity-admin account --create yourusername --password=xyz

3   Starting Posterity

Congratulations, you have now installed and configured Posterity. The final step is to start Posterity, the easiest way is to use posterity-admin's built-in web server:

$ posterity-admin serve --port 8080

You should now be able to login using your newly created account on the following address

http://127.0.0.1:8080/

A mail account is not very useful unless it can actually receive mail. Please read the Receiving Mail section for further instructions.