This guide will serve as a basic introduction to installing Review Board for development purposes only. These steps have been tested on Linux, macOS, and the Linux subsystem for Windows 10.

<aside> ⚠️ THIS IS NOT FOR PRODUCTION USE!

Unless you are developing Review Board itself, close this page now and refer to the official installation documentation for Review Board.

This guide is not used to set up a Review Board server for production.

Using these steps to upgrade a production server may break things. To resolve this, you may need to contact [email protected] and request a Premium Support contract in order for us to evaluate and assist in repair.

</aside>

Please follow this guide carefully! We cover important steps and caveats you should not miss!

The methods in this guide should not be used to install Review Board for production use or on a production server. It certainly should not be used with a production database. We recommend installing Review Board on a separate development system. You can still build Review Board packages from the development version and install them on a production system, if you feel comfortable.

We use Git for development. It's expected that you have some familiarity with Git. If not, there's a lot of guides online to help with the basics, and we can answer any questions you might have.

<aside> 🐍 Important Notes about Python Versions

Review Board 3.0 and older requires Python 2.7.

Review Board 4.0 will support for Python 2.7 and 3.6-3.9.

Review Board 5.0+ will only support Python 3.7+ releases.

We'll show the version compatibility in the tables below.

</aside>

Getting Python

<aside> 🖐 Wait! Don't skip over this. You may have Python already, but maybe you can do better than what's already installed.

We discuss several options here, but we recommend using pyenv for the most consistent experience.

</aside>

<aside> ⚠️ Apple M1 user?

We've provided guidance where we can on getting set up on an M1-based CPU.

See also Python on Apple M1 for information.

</aside>

The version of Python on your operating system is probably not ideal for development. You may not have all the versions required for testing, and they may be buggy or incomplete.