Installation

Installing Salal

Salal requires Python version 3.6 or higher.

You can install the latest version of Salal like this:

pip install salal

Salal also requires the following two Python libraries:

• Jinja2
• lxml

Python will attempt to install them when you install Salal. However, depending on your system, you may not be able to install lxml that way, as it depends on libxml2 and libxslt, which are C libraries, not Python packages.

Installing a web server

You will probably want to be able to view your site locally before you deploy it to a server. Although you can view individual HTML files directly in a browser, this has a tendency to break things in all but the simplest sites because path names won't work correctly. For example, this won't work:

 <link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/style.css" type="text/css" />

The solution is to use a server installed on your local machine for testing purposes. If you are already using such a server, you can ignore the rest of this section. If this is new to you, here are a few options.

There is a simple web server you can run from within Python:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Common_questions/set_up_a_local_testing_server

If you are using Windows, there is a built-in web server you can use called IIS. It's a bit more complicated than the Python server, but also has more features:

https://www.dnsstuff.com/windows-iis-server-tools

If you want to take the plunge and use a legitimate production server, you could install Apache:

https://httpd.apache.org/

One advantage of going with Apache is that it's widely used on the web, and may well be what's running on whatever server you deploy to. That may not matter to you at first, but if you want to add a backend to your site, or use things like HTTP redirects or custom error pages, then you may not be able to test that locally unless you use the same server locally as what is used for your production site.