Author: Richard Kay
PyLETS is a webserver application, best run on a Linux cloud server. It isn't a standalone Windows or Apple Mac type application, so it won't run or install like one.
Standalone LETS accounting programs exist, but these don't handle account-related communications with account holders or allow members to input their own payments and look up each others' balances and account summaries on-line.
As a webserver application your account administrator and members can process payments and access their accounts using a web address, e.g. http://www.someplace_lets.org/accounts/ . They will be able to do this using any web browser from any computer with an Internet connection, whether it is a high-end mobile phone or running Windows, Macintosh, Linux or a cable Internet box on top of their telly etc.
A.
If you have someone within your LETS group who understands better than you how to install and run a webserver and CGI software then ask them. If not, you might do better to to find your nearest Linux user group and recruit one of their members into your LETS group. If your LETS group offers goods and services a Linux user group member with suitable skills needs this shouldn't be too difficult.
It's recently (2024) been ported to run on the Python 3 platform. Earlier distributed versions ran on Python 2, but Python 2 is no longer fixed for security bugs. Python 3 is the programming language PyLETS is written in. Python3 will need to be installed on the web server computer for this to work, but it's probably there already on most Linux or other open source server operating systems. Python is available comes preinstalled on Unix and Linux and is downloadable and installable for other operating systems, including Windows and Macintosh. You will also need a webserver which can handle CGI scripts, e.g. Apache or Nginx.
A.
If you want to install a new server just to run PyLETS, Linux and Apache2 combine to provide a powerful and cooperative free as in speech software system which is excellent for running web servers. PyLETS is run operationally by it's author on the stable version of Debian (Feb 2024) Bookworm, but should work on other versions of Linux such as Ubuntu, Fedora, Red Hat etc. It's not expected to be difficult to use Nginx if you prefer this to Apache, but you will need to be able to run CGI (Common Gateway Interface) programs. If you can run WSGI programs, the PyLETS author has written a compatibility layer to run CGI web applications from a WSGI server, but this isn't heavily tested in a production environment yet.
Check the source code for programs make_install.py, make_configure.py, make_test.py and make_clean.py . You may decide to put configuration .cfg files and the database .pkl files somewhere under /home or /usr/local e.g. /usr/local/pylets when you install. The file default_paths.py is automatically edited by these programs to locate data and configurations in appropriate folders, which should not be browsable based on the Apache configuration.
All web server installations have different configuration requirements. If your webserver allows browsing of files with any extension, you may be able to achieve this by varying the permissions on files ending in .pkl (the extension used for the data files). Alternatively, if you are using Apache, and you don't want any other files ending in .pkl or .cfg to be browseable, the following addition to httpd.conf should do the trick:
<Files ~ "\.pkl$">
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</Files>
<Files ~ "\.cfg$">
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</Files>
blank_addresses.py is intended for adding additional columns to records in members.pkl to enable full contact details to be included.
list_emails.py is intended for listing emails from members.pkl e.g. so you can import addresses into a mailing list management program e.g. GNU Mailman.
master_key.py is intended as a last resort method of setting the admin PIN if repeated login failures result in a denial of access.
pkltohtml.py is intended for general viewing of database tables by dumping these into HTML format.
add_limit_to_balances.py adds the limit column to balances.pkl , to enable debit limits to be handled. Initial default values of None for no automatic limit processing will be used.
If you have other import requirements, e.g. to import CSV data from another community currency program, it's recommended you read the source code to the above programs as starting points.