Upgrade Nikola (2020-10)

Installation Changed

When I first installed Nikola a year ago, I just used pip3 to install the Nikola package. That version of Nikola broke when Python was upgraded from 3.7 to 3.8. The current recommended procedure is to install Nikola in a virtual environment.

Update Procedure

  1. Install python3-venv on Ubuntu:

    sudo apt-get install python3-venv

  2. Create a venv called "nikola":

    cd ~/src/tschutter.github.io
python3 -m venv nikola

  3. Add nikola dir to the .gitignore file:

    grep -qxF 'nikola' .gitignore ||\
  echo "$(echo nikola | cat - .gitignore | sort)" > .gitignore
git commit -m ".gitignore: added nikola venv" .gitignore

  4. Enable the new venv:

    cd nikola
source bin/activate

  5. Upgrade pip, setuptools, and wheel modules in the venv:

    bin/python -m pip install --upgrade pip setuptools wheel

  6. Install Nikola:

    bin/python -m pip install --upgrade "Nikola[extras]"

  7. Disable old version of Nikola:

    sudo mv /usr/local/bin/nikola /usr/local/bin/nikola-old
cd /usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages
sudo mv nikola nikola-old
sudo mv Nikola-8.0.2.dist-info Nikola-old-8.0.2.dist-info

See also: