Install Nikola in virtualenv

Nikola is a static website/blog generator written in Python. You can install it in a virtualenv. Although it supports Python 2 and Python 3 I had trouble using Nikola version 7.1 with Python 3.4. Python 2.7 (tested on Ubuntu 14.04) and Python 3.3 (tested on Mac OS X Mavericks) worked fine.

Install pre-requisites:

sudo aptitude install build-essential python-dev python-pip python-virtualenv libxml2-dev libxslt-dev zlib1g-dev

I had to add a few dev libraries to get rid of some errors on Ubuntu.

Install libxml2-dev and libxslt-dev to get rid of error: “fatal error: libxml/xmlversion.h: No such file or directory”.

Install zlib1g-dev to get rid of error: “/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lz”.

cg@host ~ $ virtualenv virt-nikola

cg@host ~ $ source virt-nikola/bin/activate

(virt-nikola)cg@host ~ $ pip install nikola

(virt-nikola)cg@host ~ $ pip install nikola[extras]

Hat tip: “/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lz”, Ubuntu 11 : fatal error: libxml/xmlversion.h: No such file or directory