DevGuide Installation

Table of Contents

[TOC]

Introduction

As a Python application, SCons 1.x/2.x and previous versions use standard means for installation and packaging of Python modules. More specifically - distutils. While this works good for Unix systems, it is not that convenient on Windows. See SConsInstaller for background.

There are three possible ways of SCons installation:

• SCons is installed globally and it just works when you type scons;
• SCons is installed locally and works when you specify a full or relative path to scons;
• SCons is not installed, but copied into the project source tree and executed from there.

Windows Details

SCons can be installed and used through several ways on Windows:

From source:

Download source distributive, unpack and run python setup.py install

This installs modules into Python\scons-<version> dir, creates scons.bat and scons-2.0.1.bat scripts in Python\ directory, and places actual command line scripts scons, sconsign and scons-time that are executed by .bat files into Python\Scripts directory (along with their versioned copies).

As a result, SCons is not importable from Python shell. This was made to allow multiple SCons versions to coexist side-by-side in single Python installation long before virtualenv was born.

Using distutils installer:

Usually named scons-<version>.setup.exe it can be downloaded from SCons site.

Installer allows to uninstall SCons from Windows control panel, but file layout is different. Modules are placed into Python\Lib\site-packages\scons-<version> and are not importable as in source installation. .bat files and script files are all located in Python\Scripts.

Using setuptools easy_install:

As of 15 April 2011 this way still doesn't work on Windows.

With python -m easy_install scons the latest version (currently alpha) is downloaded from PyPI web site.

Main problem that due to misplaced directories, SCons scripts can not find SCons modules (which are not importable). Next alpha after 15 Apr 2011 will include fix to allow executing SCons with scripts from Python\Scripts directory, and maybe with .bat files. File layout is different for this case also.

Using distutils MSI installer:

Attempt to build this installer currently fails on FILEaixc++.py, which seem to be an invalid filename for MSI.

Copy scons manually:

...

Run from checkout:

Useful for development and sending patches ...

Unix Details