Adopting Theon – Part 2

The first part of this series discussed why you might use Theon as a Schema Management Tool for your PostgreSQL database. This part covers the necessary packages and installation. The final part will be an introductory tutorial.

Theon is available from here directly from the relevant Git repositories. Pre-built packages (RPM’s) are also available from here for Scientific Linux 7, but would probably work as-is on comparable distributions, for example RedHat Enterprise Linux, Centos and Fedora.

Theon contains three components. The base component contains the framework the schema for Theon itself, standard transforms, the factory core templates and all the documentation. The Theon Toolkit component contains the command line interface. The Theon UI contains the generic web browser graphical database interface. All of these are needed to use Theon. There are also some development packages, but these are only necessary to make changes to Theon itself.

Theon requires a couple of custom support tools. Gurgle, which is used as the factory template engine. Schematic, which is used to process the XML-Schema files and apply transforms. Both of these are also available from here, either direct from the Git repositories or as pre-built packages.

There are also a number of pre-requisite third party packages required, such as PostgreSQL, Python and various modules. Theon UI uses YUI2 – the necessary software for this has been re-packaged and is also available directly from here.

If you use Yum everything can be obtained from the Theon Yum Repository. In order to use this first create a suitable Yum repository configuration file as below.

cat >/etc/yum.repos.d/theon.repo <<EOF
[theon]
name=Theon Repository
baseurl=http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/theon/repo/rpms/os/el7/x86_64/
gpgcheck=0
enabled=1
EOF

Then install the core packages.

yum install gurgle-postgresql schematic yuidoc yuicompressor yui2 theon theon-library theon-library-book theon-library-ui theon-tk theon-ui

Yum will install other pre-requisite software automatically, assuming it is available for your platform.

If you want to use Theon as a PostgreSQL extension module then you will also need the package below, built for version 9.2.23.

yum install theon-library-extension_9.2.23

The following packages are only necessary for doing Theon development.

yum install theon-library-devel theon-ui-devel

Alternatively you can clone the Git repositories and build from source for your target platform. You will need to first install all pre-requisite software (see the “.spec” file). The builds are done simply as part of the package build and so you will also need rpm/rpmbuild available on your platform, or you will need to extract and script the content of the package “.spec” file.

Gurgle
cd /tmp
git clone git://afsgit.inf.ed.ac.uk/timc/gurgle
cd gurgle
./makerpm
rpmbuild -ba ${RPMROOT}/SPECS/gurgle.spec
rpm -U ${RPMROOT}/RPMS/x86_64/gurgle-postgresql-*.rpm
Schematic
cd /tmp
git clone git://afsgit.inf.ed.ac.uk/timc/schematic
cd schematic
./makerpm
rpmbuild -ba ${RPMROOT}/SPECS/schematic.spec
rpm -U ${RPMROOT}/RPMS/noarch/schematic-*.rpm
Theon Toolkit
cd /tmp
git clone git://afsgit.inf.ed.ac.uk/timc/theon-tk
cd theon-tk
./makerpm
rpm -i ${RPMROOT}/SRPMS/x86_64/theon-tk-1.1-1.src.rpm
rpmbuild -ba ${RPMROOT}/SPECS/theon-tk.spec
rpm -U ${RPMROOT}/RPMS/noarch/theon-tk-*.rpm
 Theon
cd /tmp
git clone git://afsgit.inf.ed.ac.uk/timc/theon
cd theon
./makerpm
rpm -i ${RPMROOT}/SRPMS/x86_64/theon-1.1-1.src.rpm
rpmbuild -ba ${RPMROOT}/SPECS/theon.spec
rpm -U ${RPMROOT}/RPMS/noarch/theon-*.rpm
Theon UI
cd /tmp
git clone git://afsgit.inf.ed.ac.uk/timc/theon-ui
cd theon-ui
./makerpm
rpm -i ${RPMROOT}/SRPMS/x86_64/theon-ui-1.1-1.src.rpm
rpmbuild -ba ${RPMROOT}/SPECS/theon-ui.spec
rpm -U ${RPMROOT}/RPMS/noarch/theon-ui-*.rpm

Theon will be installed at the following paths by default.

/usr/share/theon
/etc/theon
/usr/lib/theon
/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/theontk
/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/theonui
/usr/bin/theontk*
/usr/bin/ttk*

You should now be ready to go.

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