PyLucene in a virtualenv on Ubuntu12.04

Ubuntu ships with a PyLucene version in its repositories, installing that one is straight forward:

$ sudo apt-get install pylucene

However the version is a bit outdated, so I try installing it from source. For people who don't want to install it in their local virtualenv the whole process is well discribed here: http://john.wesorick.com/2011/11/installing-pylucene-on-ubuntu

I'll stick to the structure of this description but tweak it to be installed in my virtualenv.

Get Java

$ sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jre openjdk-7-jdk ant

Get and unpack PyLucene's source

$ wget http://www.eu.apache.org/dist/lucene/pylucene/pylucene-(latest)
$ tar xvfx pylucene-(latest)

In my case (latest) is version 3.6.0-2

Build jcc

$ cd pylucene-3.6.0-2/jcc/

Edit setup.py and change the dictionary JDK to contain the Java version just installed:

JDK = {
    'linux2': '/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-i386',
}

Now run the setup, I didn't have patches setuptools, I guess that's due to the different version you get in your virtualenv? Anyway:

$ python setup.py install

Build PyLucene

Edit Makefile in the root directory: I have to set the following variables:

# pylucene-3.6.0-2/Makefile
# ...
PREFIX_PYTHON=(path/to/your/virtualenv)
ANT=JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-i386 /usr/bin/ant
PYTHON=$(PREFIX_PYTHON)/bin/python
JCC=$(PYTHON) -m jcc --shared
NUM_FILES=4

If you don't know the path to your virtualenv, type 'which python', $PREFIX_PYTHON is the the bit in front of '/bin'.
Now build PyLucene and see whether it works.

$ make
$ make install
$ make test