Installation

The Nano Client is available in prebuilt binary distribution packages for major platforms. Most users will wish to use these for convenience. People who wish to install from source can find the guide here as well. Either way, download the files of your choice from the download page.

Installing binaries

The prebuilt applications have all of their dependencies bundled. They should work if the OS requirements are met.

Windows

For Windows the prebuilt application is available as an installer executable. It will extract the application into the Program Files and create a start-menu shortcut. Creating a desktop and an auto-start on login shortcut can be disabled.

macOS

For macOS there are two dmg (virtual disk image) files available. One for Intel (64bit) systems and the other for the new Apple Silicone (M1) systems. Download the image of the application corresponding to your device.

Double-clicking on the downloaded file will verify and mount the distribution image. It will contain the Nano client application called Clarabot Nano and a link to your Applications folder. Dragging the Clarabot Nano to the Applications folder copies it to the system conveniently. The Gatekeeper will verify and prompt you when running the application for the very first time.

Linux

For Linux we provide an AppImage containing the application. It is built on a fairly EOL distribution so most systems should have no trouble running it. On recently released systems some compatibility packages may be need for running it, like libxcrypt-compat on Arch Linux.

Installing from source

This guide is applicable to all platforms, but it focuses on Linux. This guide is a simple recommendation to give an overview of the steps necessary, but other customizations and configurations are possible.

Prerequisites

  • Python version 3.10

  • wxWidgets 3+ (for compiling wxPython)

  • protobuf library (for compiling gcld3)

  • dbus library (for compiling dbus-python)

  • OpenJDK (Java) 11

  • Apache Maven (for building the Picoture module; 3.8 recommended)

Installation steps

  1. Download the latest source package of clarabot-nano and clarabot-crypto from the downloads page

  2. Create virtualenv for nano installation

    python3.10 -m venv ~/.nano && source ~/.nano/bin/activate

  3. Install the wheel package before any other

    pip install wheel

  4. Install clarabot-crypto and clarabot-nano packages

    pip install clarabot-crypto-X.X.X-src.zip clarabot-crypto-X.X.X-src.zip

  5. Launch clarabot_nano. It will stop with an error at this point, but it will bootstrap the local configuration. Close it

    python -m clarabot_nano

  6. Download Apache Tika 2.6.0 and Apache Solr 8.11.2. These version are what get bundled with binary distribution currently. Newer updates to these major releases may work as well.

  7. Create directories for solr and tika

    mkdir ~/.nano/tika ~/.nano/solr

  8. Copy tika-server-standard-X.X.X.jar to ~/.nano/tika/

  9. Extract solr-X.X.X.tgz and copy the contents of the extracted solr-X.X.X directory to ~/.nano/solr/.

    cd ~/.nano/solr && tar --strip-components=1 -xf solr-X.X.X.tgz

  10. Edit ~/.config/clarabot/nano/local.yml by uncommenting and setting solr_bundle_dir to /home/YOUR_USERNAME/.nano/solr and tika_bundle_dir to /home/YOUR_USERNAME/.nano/tika. They are at the bottom of the file.

  11. Start nano with

    python -m clarabot_nano

    OR

    Create script to start nano by saving the following to a file, set execute permissions with chmod +x filename, then double-click on the file to run nano

#!/bin/bash
source ~/.nano/bin/activate
python -m clarabot_nano

After installation

After starting the application, log in with your Nano user account credentials. If you don’t have a Nano account set up, make sure to do so by following the steps explained in the Registration chapter.

The Nano Client comes with a default configuration wizard. The wizard will help you in setting up your client for first time general usage.