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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.

Using Docker

If you have Docker installed on your computer, you can use the supplied Makefile and docker-compose configuration to build and run a container that hosts the application:

$ make build
# This runs a single command which you can also execute directly:
$ docker-compose build --pull

Once the container images have been built, you can run the zavod command-line tool within the container:

$ docker-compose run --rm app zavod --help
# Or, run a specific subcommand:
$ docker-compose run --rm app zavod crawl datasets/ua/edr/ua_edr.yml
# You can also just run a shell inside the container, and then execute multiple
# commands in sequence:
$ docker-compose run --rm app bash
container$ zavod crawl datasets/ua/edr/ua_edr.yml
# The above command to spawn an interactive shell is also available as:
$ make shell

The docker environment will provide the commands inside the container with access to the data/ directory in the current working directory, i.e. the repository root. You can find any generated outputs and the copy of the processing database in that directory.

Python virtual environment

The application is a fairly stand-alone Python application, albeit with a large number of library dependencies. That's why we suggest that you should never install zavod directly into your system Python, and instead always use a virtual environment. Within a fresh virtual environment (Python >= 3.10), you should be able to install zavod using pip:

# Inside the opensanctions repository path:
$ pip install -e "./zavod[dev]"
# 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.).

Please note

zavod has dependecies on PyICU - a library related to the transliteration of names in other alphabets to the latin character set - and Plyvel - a fast and feature-rich Python interface to LevelDB. The installation and configuration of both libraries can be complex due to system dependencies. Consider following the PyICU and Plyvel documentation for the installation of both libraries.

Plyvel on Mac OS X: issue

For development you may also want to install yamllint - we use that to check for valid and correctly formatted yaml in datasets.

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_RESOLVER_PATH must be set to the path to a nomenklatura resolver JSON lines file. It can be an empty file. e.g. data/resolver.ijson
  • ZAVOD_SYNC_POSITIONS (default True) - When true, attempts to sync PEP positions with our positions database, requiring ZAVOD_OPENSANCTIONS_API_KEY to be set with a valid key. Usually best set to False in development.
  • ZAVOD_ARCHIVE_BACKEND default FileSystemBackend which is usually good for crawler development. Can be GoogleCloudBackend which allows backfilling from the data lake, e.g. so that an exporter for a collection can backfill data it wants to load into its store from other crawlers.
  • ZAVOD_ARCHIVE_BUCKET - e.g. data.opensanctions.org