Developing in a Virtualenv

For development purposes, Plaso can be installed using virtualenv.

Note that this is intended for development use only, and if you aren’t comfortable debugging package installation, this is not for you.

Fedora

Install virtualenv

To install virtualenv on Fedora (or equivalent) run:

sudo dnf install python-virtualenv

Installing build dependencies

TODO add more text

Ubuntu

Installing virtualenv

To install virtualenv on Ubuntu (or equivalent) run:

sudo apt-get install python-virtualenv

Installing build dependencies

TODO add more text

sudo apt-get install libyaml-dev liblzma-dev

MacOS

Installing virtualenv

If you have pip setup on your system, you can install virtualenv using:

pip install virtualenv

To install pip, either install a version of Python 3.6+ or, using homebrew, run:

brew install python@3

Installing build dependencies

TODO

The pycrypto dependency requires the gmp library. This is installable with homebrew:

brew install gmp

Once setup, we need to add the paths for the system to locate the gmp library. This is accomplished during the pip install -r requirements.txt stage of the next section. Before running the pip install ... command, please run:

export "CFLAGS=-I/usr/local/include -L/usr/local/lib"

Setting up Plaso in a virtualenv

  1. Create a virtualenv called ‘plasoenv’ virtualenv plasoenv

  2. Activate the virtualenv: source ./plasoenv/bin/activate

  3. Update pip (Note that using pip outside virtualenv is not recommended as it ignores your systems package manager.): pip install --upgrade pip

  4. Install the Python requirements

    # Where 'plaso' is your local Plaso source directory
cd plaso
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/log2timeline/plaso/main/requirements.txt
pip install -r requirements.txt

  5. Once you finish you development session, deactivate virtualenv: deactivate