Installing PyLucene 10.0.0 in a conda environment (on Linux)

I use micromamba. It is awesome for environment management. But all the commands here can be replaced with conda/mamba too.

1 Environment Setup

1.1 Setting up Java

1. Install Temurin JDK 21 (See Installation) or direct download the JDK. It is also available on the AUR for Arch Linux users.

   yay -S jdk21-temurin  # for arch users
   

   Important: If you are direct downloading the JDK from the website, make sure that the extracted directory of the JDK contains the substring temurin. If the downloaded tar.gz file extracts to the directory jdk-21.0.7+6, you may rename it to temurin-jdk-21.0.7+6 or anything else that contains the word temurin.

2. Configure JAVA_HOME and PATH environment variables.

   export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-21-temurin  # adjust appropriately
   export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH
   

   or in NuShell,

   $env.JAVA_HOME = '/usr/lib/jvm/java-21-temurin'  # adjust appropriately
   $env.PATH = [($env.JAVA_HOME | path join "bin")] ++ $env.PATH
   

   Adjust JAVA_HOME environment variable appropriately to point to the Temurin JDK directory.
   Note that JAVA_HOME/bin should be added to the beginning of the PATH environment variable.

1.2 Create environment and activate it

1. micromamba create -n ir python=3.11
   micromamba activate ir
   

   JCC installation requires distutils which was a part of standard library in Python, but has been deprecated since 3.10 and is removed in 3.12.
   I installed Python=3.11.

2. Install build using pip.

   pip install build
   

2 Install PyLucene

2.1 Download and extract PyLucene

1. tar -xvzf pylucene-10.0.0-src.tar.gz
2. cd pylucene-10.0.0-src

From this point onwards make sure:

1. You are inside the ir environment (which has Python=3.11 and build installed).
2. JAVA_HOME is set properly to point to correct Temurin JDK 21 path.
3. PATH contains JAVA_HOME/bin at its beginning.

2.2 Install JCC in the ir environment

1. cd jcc

2. Modify setup.py so that the JDK dictionary with key as linux has same value as JAVA_HOME i.e. the path to Temurin 21 JDK directory.

   JDK = {
   ...
   'linux': '/usr/lib/jvm/java-24-temurin',
   ...
   }
   

3. python setup.py build
4. python setup.py install

2.3 Install PyLucene in the ir environment

1. cd .. → Go back into the PyLucene root directory.
2. Edit the MakeFile to uncomment the block mentioning Linux and Python3.

3. In the uncommented block, modify the PREFIX_PYTHON and PYTHON variables to point to the Python location in ir environment.
   For example,

   PREFIX_PYTHON=/home/adi/.local/share/mamba/envs/ir
   PYTHON=$(PREFIX_PYTHON)/bin/python
   

   You can get this location via the command which python when the ir environment is activated.

4. make
5. make test to see if there were any failures.
6. make install

2.4 Verify installation

Run the following in the Python CLI to verify the installation:

import lucene
lucene.initVM()

Congratulations! You have successfully installed PyLucene 10.0.0 🥳.