Bash script for a Chef recipe to install PIL with Zlib and Freetype support in a Vagrant Ubuntu 32bit box. I wish PIL offered a cleaner way of doing this other than having to modify its setup.py.

gistfile1.rb

%w{libjpeg-dev libfreetype6-dev}.each do |pkg|
  package pkg do
    action :install
  end
end

bash "Install PIL from source" do
  user vagrant
  group vagrant
  code <<-EOH
  . #{virtualenv_path}/bin/activate
  pip install --no-install PIL==1.1.7
  sed 's/ZLIB_ROOT = None/ZLIB_ROOT = ("\\/usr\\/lib\\/i386-linux-gnu", "\\/usr\\/include")/' #{virtualenv_path}/build/PIL/setup.py > #{virtualenv_path}/build/PIL/setup-modified.py ; mv #{virtualenv_path}/build/PIL/setup-modified.py #{virtualenv_path}/build/PIL/setup.py
  sed 's/FREETYPE_ROOT = None/FREETYPE_ROOT = ("\\/usr\\/lib\\/i386-linux-gnu", "\\/usr\\/include\\/freetype2\\/freetype")/' #{virtualenv_path}/build/PIL/setup.py > #{virtualenv_path}/build/PIL/setup-modified.py ; mv #{virtualenv_path}/build/PIL/setup-modified.py #{virtualenv_path}/build/PIL/setup.py
  python #{virtualenv_path}/build/PIL/setup.py install
  EOH
  not_if "test -d #{virtualenv_path}/lib/python2.7/site-packages/PIL"
end

Thanks for the tip, Jannis. However, after a quick look it seems like you'd still need to manually modify Pillow's setup.py to enable zlib/freetype support.

Instead of modifying setup.py, I usually create the symlinks that it needs, like so:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libjpeg.so /usr/lib/libjpeg.so
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libz.so /usr/lib/libz.so
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libfreetype.so /usr/lib/libfreetype.so

This has the benefit of being able to manually (re)install PIP (e.g. in a new virtualenv) on the machine in the future without any issues.

Note that depending on the distro you use, the libraries may be in directories other than /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/. If you have a 64-bit machine, they obviously won't be there. On CentOS/RedHat boxes, they can also be under /usr/lib64.

The symlink approach is quite neat, thanks. Also yes, the code above is only for a 32bit Ubuntu distro. The recipe could be improved by leveraging Chef's distro detection logic.