Installation and Configuration

See also

This guide is for installing and configuring the Wn software. For adding lexicons to the database, see Working with Lexicons.

Installing from PyPI

Install the latest release from PyPI:

pip install wn

To get the dependencies for the wn.web module, use the web installation extra:

pip install wn[web]

The Data Directory

By default, Wn stores its data (such as downloaded LMF files and the database file) in a .wn_data/ directory under the user's home directory. This directory can be changed (see Configuration below). Whenever Wn attempts to download a resource or access its database, it will check for the existence of, and create if necessary, this directory, the .wn_data/downloads/ subdirectory, and the .wn_data/wn.db database file. The file system will look like this:

.wn_data/
├── downloads
│   ├── ...
│   └── ...
└── wn.db

The ... entries in the downloads/ subdirectory represent the files of resources downloaded from the web. Their filename is a hash of the URL so that Wn can avoid downloading the same file twice.

Configuration

The wn.config object contains the paths Wn uses for local storage and information about resources available on the web. To change the directory Wn uses for storing data locally, modify the wn.config.data_directory member:

import wn
wn.config.data_directory = '~/Projects/wn_data'

There are some things to note:

  • The downloads directory and database path are always relative to the data directory and cannot be changed directly.

  • This change only affects subsequent operations, so any data in the previous location will not be moved nor deleted.

  • This change only affects the current session. If you want a script or application to always use the new location, it must reset the data directory each time it is initialized.

You can also add project information for remote resources. First you add a project, with a project ID, full name, and language code. Then you create one or more versions for that project with a version ID, resource URL, and license information. This may be done either through the wn.config object's add_project() and add_project_version() methods, or loaded from a TOML file via the wn.config object's load_index() method.

wn.config.add_project('ewn', 'English WordNet', 'en')
wn.config.add_project_version(
    'ewn', '2020',
    'https://en-word.net/static/english-wordnet-2020.xml.gz',
    'https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/',
)

Installing From Source

If you wish to install the code from the source repository (e.g., to get an unreleased feature or to contribute toward Wn's development), clone the repository and use Flit to install:

$ git clone https://github.com/goodmami/wn.git
$ cd wn
$ flit install

Developers of Wn may want to use the --symlink option which makes the install "editable" (subsequent edits to the source code will be reflected without having to reinstall):

$ flit install --symlink