Compiling Duplicity on CentOS 5.x

Duplicity, an encrypted backup utility that uses the rsync algorithm, is becoming quite useful for my day to day backups. I’ve written several backup scripts using rsync, gzip, and other useful backup schemes. Heck, I’ve even written my own backup subroutines that create a backup structure based of the current date. So, trust me, I usually never change my ways, unless it’s something that really intrigues me.

Some Background Information

I’m still testing some stuff out, however, I’m pretty confident that I’m going to be pushing some new code to implement Duplicity in my backup scripts. I run several Linux distribution, depending on when they were built, my requirements, and user preference. Slightly off-topic, I run Gentoo, CentOS, and some Ubuntu (not really anymore, I have pretty much quit using Ubuntu as a server OS; personal preference). These days I try running just Gentoo, for many reason I won’t go into here.

The Problem

Something that I love about Gentoo (I told myself to try to refrain from explaining why I use Gentoo), the huge community that can expedite the release of cutting-edge software releases. So, usually when a software package gets updated, you can usually expect updates compatible with Gentoo within a week or two, so you are always (usually) up to date; obviously this isn’t true with every package. Enough about Gentoo – let’s focus here! The problem is that CentOS, from what I’ve seen in all my years of using it is, updates are pretty slow in the way of packages, unless they are very, such as Apache or PHP, etc. The current version of Duplicity is version 0.6.05, however, my CentOS install (CentOS 5.3) of Duplicity is 0.5.18.

Shell Prompt – Duplicity Version

[user@host ~]# yum info duplicity | grep Version
Version    : 0.5.18

Release 0.5.18 was released on May 20th, 2009. That’s five months and 6 releases ago. So, I wrote this article up to make it a breeze to compile the newest version of Duplicity on your CentOS 5.x system. Again, current version at the time of writing this article is 0.6.05.

Installing Duplicity From Source

In order to install the latest version of Duplicity from source, you will need to install its dependencies. What is so nice (and so bad) about RPM’s is the fact that they are pre-compiled binaries, which means that the direct dependencies to actually build the source is not required on the system; you just have to have the dependencies that the package depends on. The dependencies required for you to compile Duplicity from source is python-devel and librsync-devel. If you already have the old version of Duplicity, you should already have the dependencies for the package (e.g. python binaries). So, assuming that you already have the RPM-based package installed, let’s install the packages required just for compiling the source.

Shell Prompt – Installing Dependencies

[user@host ~]# yum install python-devel librsync-devel librsync

Once installed, go ahead and download the tar.gz source from Launchpad. Once you have this, we will need to extract the source to the local disk. After extraction, we will then build the source and install the binaries using Python. Sounds hard, but it is quite easy.

Shell Prompt – Extract/Build/Compile Duplicity Source

[user@host ~]# wget http://launchpad.net/duplicity/0.6-series/0.6.05/+download/duplicity-0.6.05.tar.gz
[user@host ~]# tar -xzvf ./duplicity-0.6.05.tar.gz
[user@host ~]# cd duplicity-0.6.05
[user@host ~]# python ./setup.py build
--- output ---
[user@host ~]# python ./setup.py install
--- output ---

Your done! If you didn’t get any serious errors that halted the build/install of the source, then you should have the newest version installed. You can verify this by checking the version installed; you shouldn’t have to update your BASH alias’.

Shell Prompt – Duplicity Version Check

[user@host ~]# duplicity --version
duplicity 0.6.05

Closing Remarks

There are actually a few significant features from the 0.5.18 and the 0.6.05, so this is another reason I wrote this up. I normally don’t go this deep into something, unless its for a good cause (features, security, etc). If you run into any issues, please don’t hesitate to let me know in the comments.