Installation

Python 3.4 or newer is required. Standard tools such as pip and/or modules to create a virtual environment are assumed to be present. The program’s specific dependencies are:

• requests >= 2.21.0
• cryptography >= 2.4.2

Older version may also work, but have not been tested.

If your DNS records are managed by Cloudflare, then alnitak can use their native API package, python-cloudflare in order to manage DNS records. This is not required, but is recommended; install the package via pip as:

~$ pip install cloudflare

and alnitak will use it automatically (and fall back to requests calls otherwise).

The program has been tested on Debian (Jessie and Stretch). It should work for all Unix-like systems, or at least all systems that provide fcntl, support for symbolic links and that follow the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard).

PyPI

The program can be installed from PyPI directly:

~$ pip install alnitak

either into a virtual environment or system-wide.

From Source

Source can be downloaded from github:

~$ git clone https://github.com/definitelyprobably/alnitak

You can optionally create a virtual environment for the package. Once cloned, open the newly downloaded directory and install dependencies with:

~/alnitak$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Installation can be done with:

~/alnitak$ python setup.py install

Testing

The test scripts are run with pytest. First install pytest:

~/alnitak$ pip install pytest

You should first enter development mode before running the tests, or else some tests will fail:

~/alnitak$ python setup.py develop

The tests can be run with the command:

~/alnitak$ python setup.py test

Note that although alnitak needs root permissions to run, running the tests does not, even though the tests simulate runs of the program. Neither do the tests require any Let’s Encrypt files to be present on the system, or interact with any such files if they are present. The tests do not interact with the system outside the directory the tests are run from.