Skip to content

Installation

zavod can be installed as a standalone Python application, or by using Docker as a runtime environment. In order to choose the correct installation path, consider the following questions: Do you just want to execute the existing crawlers, or change them and add your own data sources? Getting zavod to run inside a Docker container is very easy, but it makes working on the code harder and stands in the way of debugging a crawler as it is being developed.

In any case, you will need to check out the OpenSanctions repository which houses the zavod application to your computer:

$ git clone https://github.com/opensanctions/opensanctions.git
$ cd opensanctions

The steps below assume you're working within a checkout of that repository.

Python virtual environment

The application is a fairly stand-alone Python application, albeit with a large number of library dependencies. To set up a local development environment using uv:

# Inside the opensanctions repository path:
$ pushd zavod; uv sync --extra dev --extra docs; popd
# Activate the virtualenv. You probably want to put this in your .envrc
$ source zavod/.venv/bin/activate
# You can check if the application has been installed successfully by
# invoking the command-line tool:
$ zavod --help

If you encounter any errors during the installation, please consider googling errors related to libraries used by zavod (e.g.: SQLAlchemy, Python-Levenshtein, click, etc.).

Installing plyvel on macOS

To make Plyvel install on macOS, set the following environment variables before running uv sync.

export CPPFLAGS="-I$(brew --prefix leveldb)/include/ -L$(brew --prefix leveldb)/lib/ -fno-rtti"

For more information on this painpoint, see the related GitHub issue

Running a database

Some (actually, most) crawlers in zavod use the cache and some other things that get read from the database.

To bring a database up for local development:

docker compose -f ../docker-compose.yml up -d db # Bring up a dev database
# Your probably want to put this in your .envrc
export ZAVOD_DATABASE_URI=postgresql://postgres:password@localhost:5432/dev

pre-commit checks

For development, you want to use our prek configuration to automatically lint and typecheck your contributions.

  • To run these hooks automatically when running git commit, install them with prek install. You can always skip them by using git commit --no-verify.
  • If you prefer to run these hooks manually, just run prek run

Configuration

zavod is inspired by the twelve factor model and uses environment variables to configure the operation of the system. Some of the key settings include:

  • ZAVOD_DATA_PATH is the main working directory for the system. By default it will contain cached artifacts and the generated output data. This defaults to the data/ subdirectory of the current working directory when the zavod command is invoked.
  • ZAVOD_ARCHIVE_BACKEND default FileSystemBackend.
    • GoogleCloudBackend uses the data lake as an archive to backfill from. Google Cloud credentials are required.
  • ZAVOD_ARCHIVE_BUCKET - e.g. data.opensanctions.org
  • FTM_USER_AGENT - fill in your address in e.g. opensanctions-dev/1.0 (+https://opensanctions.org; you@opensanctions.org)