The Windows Node at Mimas

Worked to establish a node on the Windows Server 2008 machine and after some tweaking and self learning got through quite far installing the node.There were some issues on getting Nginx setup right though.

Then after some tweaking, Nginx goes smoothly on the Windows 2008 server after restarting the machine, but wasn’t sure why the step to push the couchapps not working. I was trying to navigate to the config folder of the LR repository
cd C:\Python27\LearningRegRepository\config
and ran the command

python setup_node.py

and was getting the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File “setup_node.py”, line 12, in
import couchdb
ImportError: No module named couchdb

Checked the python code, and couchdb folder is very much existing.. well I knew now is the time to “DEBUG” which I guess I love the most. Lou on the US Learning Registry team suggested to download version 1.1.1 from https://github.com/dch/couchdb/downloads

Damon Regan from the US Learning Registry team noticed the blog post and was happy about the work on Windows machine. He mentioned that Lou Wolford on the LR team has worked with getting the LR running on Windows. There is an active pickling error that they’re working to resolve. He shared the discussion thread on that: https://github.com/LearningRegistry/LearningRegistry/pull/167 and discussions were happening on the Windows mods during the dev calls. He hoped that all issues get resolved and I can get it up and running soon.

Later on I managed to resolve as per Jim’s suggestion for Ubuntu on https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/learningreg-dev/0sKsLb15fi8/hFFhObPk69IJ

”
cd ~/gitrepos/LearningRegistry/LR
pip install -e ./

That should install ALL LR dependencies outside of wsgi, then:

cd ~/gitrepos/config
python setup_node.py -d
”
I used the same version of couchDB as Lou suggested. The pickling error was still persisting and I was going through the discussion thread Damon mentioned in his comment.

Lou commented that they are looking into a solution that looks for what OS is running and switches between threads/processes to keep everything stable no matter what OS is being used. He promised to keep me updated and let me know ASAP when it is released.  Damon mentioned that John Poyau from the LR team is working on a new factory model to allow windows platforms to use threads and linux and mac platforms to use process. Then in few days, John was able to fix the issue by switching to use Thread instead of Process in change_monitor to fix the pickling_error in Windows. Also he tweaked the way test files are declared to be Windows-friendly.

Damon mentioned that the fix is tested on Windows, Mac and linux. He also mentioned that the fix is not formally released yet. but is in their stable master. He recommended to update our experimental windows node at Mimas from the stable master to obtain the fix. He suggested following steps as well to upgrade the node to master

”
1. Pull the most recent tag from git

cd /LearningRegistry
git checkout master
git pull

2. Run the setup node python script

python setup_node.py -d
”

Then he mentioned that it is important to re-run the setup node python script as configuration changes take place during updates. The LR team hopes to have an update script soon that will preserve our node settings on update.

Now I have followed Damon’s steps and do not see the pickling error anymore, and able to start the server on localhost. Watch this space for further development on the Windows environment.