# Quick install guide

Before you can use PySAML2, you’ll need to get it installed. This guide will guide you to a simple, minimal installation.

## Install PySAML2

For all this to work, you need to have Python installed. The development has been done using 2.7. There is now a 3.X version.

### Prerequisites

You have to have ElementTree, which is either part of your Python distribution if it’s recent enough, or if the Python is too old you have to install it, for instance by getting it from the Python Package Instance by using easy_install.

You also need xmlsec1 which you can download from http://www.aleksey.com/xmlsec/

If you’re on macOS, you can get xmlsec1 installed from MacPorts or Fink.

If you’re on rhel/centos 7 you will need to install xmlsec1 and xmlsec1-openssl:

    yum install xmlsec1 xmlsec1-openssl

Depending on how you are going to use PySAML2 you might also need

- Mako

- pyASN1

- repoze.who

- python-memcache

- memcached

### Quick build instructions

Once you have installed all the necessary prerequisites a simple:

    python setup.py install

will install the basic code.

Note for rhel/centos 6: cffi depends on libffi-devel, and cryptography on openssl-devel to compile So you might want first to do: yum install libffi-devel openssl-devel

After this, you ought to be able to run the tests without a hitch. The tests are based on the pypy test environment, so:

    cd tests
    pip install -r test-requirements.txt
    pytest

is what you should use. If you don’t have py.test, get it it’s part of pypy! It’s really good!