Installing OpenSanctions open source code

The OpenSanctions data pipeline can be installed in a few different ways, depending on your answers to these two questions:

• Do you just want to execute the existing crawlers, or change them and add your own data sources to the system?

• Are you more comfortable running the program in your own Python virtual environment, or do you prefer to isolate it in a Docker container?

While getting OpenSanctions to run inside a Docker container is very easy, it might make iteration a bit slower and stand in the way of debugging a crawler as it is being developed.

In any case, you will need to check out the OpenSanctions application from its repository to your computer:

$ git clone https://github.com/opensanctions/opensanctions.git
$ cd opensanctions

The steps below assume you're working within a checkout of that repository.

Using Docker

If you have Docker installed on your computer, you can use the supplied Makefile and docker-compose configuration to build and run a container that hosts the application:

$ make build
# This runs a single command which you can also execute directly:
$ docker-compose build --pull

Once the container images have been built, you can run the opensanctions command-line tool within the container:

$ docker-compose run --rm app opensanctions --help
# Or, run a specific subcommand:
$ docker-compose run --rm app opensanctions crawl eu_fsf
# You can also just run a shell inside the container, and then execute multiple
# commands in sequence:
$ docker-compose run --rm app bash
container$ opensanctions crawl eu_fsf
# The above command to spawn an interactive shell is also available as:
$ make shell

The docker environment will provide the commands inside the container with access to the data/ directory in the current working directory, i.e. the repository root. You can find any generated outputs and the copy of the processing database in that directory.

Python virtual environment

If you want to run OpenSanctions outside of Docker, please first make sure you have access to a PostgreSQL database instance (this can easily be installed using most package managers). You will need to expose a connection string URL as an environment variable (see below: Configuration).

The application is a fairly stand-alone Python application, albeit with a large number of library dependencies. That's why we'd suggest that you should never install OpenSanctions directly into your system Python, and instead always use a virtual environment. Within a fresh virtual environment (Python >= 3.10), you should be able to install OpenSanctions using pip:

# Inside the opensanctions repository path:
$ pip install -e .
# You can check if the application has been installed successfully by
# invoking the command-line tool:
$ opensanctions --help

If you encounter any errors during the installation, please consider googling errors related to libraries used by OpenSanctions (e.g.: SQLAlchemy, Python-Levenshtein, click, etc.).

Note 1: Please avoid installing the opensanctions package from PyPI via pip. The package exists mainly to claim the package name but is not regularly updated as part of the build/release process of OpenSanctions.

Note 2: OpenSanctions has an optional dependency on PyICU, a library related to the transliteration of names in other alphabets to the latin character set. This library is not installed by default because its configuration can be tricky. Consider following the PyICU documentation <https://pypi.org/project/PyICU/>_ to install this library and achieve better transliteration results.

Configuration

OpenSanctions is inspired by the twelve factor model and uses environment variables to configure the operation of the system. Some of the key settings include:

• OPENSANCTIONS_DATABASE_URI is a database connection string, such as postgresql://user:pass@host/database. Only PostgreSQL is supported as a database backend.

• OPENSANCTIONS_RESOLVER_PATH is a JSON file that contains deduplication judgements. You can set this to an empty file if you have not performed any deduplication, or create an file in the /data volume mount of the docker installation.

• OPENSANCTIONS_DATA_PATH is the main working directory for the system. By default it will contain cached artifacts and the generated output data. This defaults to the data/ subdirectory of the current working directory when the opensanctions command is invoked.

• OPENSANCTIONS_METADATA_PATH is the path in which the system will search for metadata specifications of datasets. By default, this points to the metadata/ subdirectory within the application source code.

Next: Using the OpenSanctions CLI