Tutorial part 1 — getting started

First things first.  You need to install blueprint before it can reverse engineer your server.  blueprint runs on any Debian- or RPM-based distribution with Python 2.6. and Git 1.7

You can start with a dedicated Linux server, a virtual instance running on your local machine via Virtualbox, VMWare Fusion or Parallels or a hosted instance from one of these providers:

• Amazon EC2
• Rackspace Cloud
• Slicehost
• Linode

Once you’ve got a running server, ssh in and choose the appropriate installation method:

From source on Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora

git clone git://github.com/devstructure/blueprint.git
cd blueprint
git submodule update --init
make && sudo make install

From source on CentOS and RHEL

rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm
yum install python26
git clone git://github.com/devstructure/blueprint.git
cd blueprint
git submodule update --init
make && sudo make install PYTHON=/usr/bin/python26

This installs Python 2.6 from EPEL side-by-side with Python 2.4 and so won’t break yum.

With a package manager

DevStructure maintains Debian packages and Python eggs for Blueprint.  See Installing with a package manager on the wiki.

In part 2 we’ll cowboy up our server and learn about the blueprint tool.