Best Practices Install with pip v5.x on Fedora 43 - SELinux?

[Waltwx]

I am a new weewx user setting up a Davis Vantage Pro2 system at my house. My favored distribution is Fedora 43 (or latest). Installation for weewx suggests using pip for recent versions of Fedora/Redhat because the epel repos are dangerous and might contaminate my system.

So... I've installed via pip and been successful, but not consistently. That is with the help of chatgpt.com (different answers from time to time), SELinux has been the problem. I'm not a sysadmin but only  a neophyte when dealing with SELinux troubleshooting (although, it looks like I'll need to become an expert).

QUESTION TO COMMUNITY

What are the recommended directories, user names and practices to install on Fedora? It looks like I can create directories in places that SELinux for Fedora allows... or I can customize SELinux to place them where I want.

What's the simplest and most straightforward way of doing the install?

Walt Rogers - Palmdale, CA

[Vince Skahan]

On Saturday, February 28, 2026 at 4:07:29 AM UTC-8 Waltwx wrote:

I've installed via pip and been successful, but not consistently.

You're going to have to explain what you mean there....

And ChatGPT is awful.  Throw snowballs at it.

I fortunately haven't had to battle selinux for years now, but my guess is weewx in Simulator mode all in your $HOME likely runs fine.  I don't know if you need to do anything special because of selinux in order to get it to connect to a VP2 (assuming you have an old vintage with a datalogger).

You might have issues trying to point your webserver to the public_html tree weewx creates.  In general, you might try having weewx write to /var/log/www/html/weewx so the webserver is looking for web files in the expected places.  There used to be a /var/log/something that selinux complained to.  No idea what the filename is these days.  I ran away from anything RedHat-ish years ago and never looked back.

[Warren Gill]

Yeah, selinux can be cryptic for sure! But you can get it going and keep selinux enforcing. The RedHat documentation is your best bet.

To be sure that selinux is the problem you can set selinux to permissive and test. If it works in permissive mode, you know it's selinux protecting you. Here are some commands I use:

• sestatus to see if SELinux is enabled and what mode.
• sudo setenforce 0 to set SELinux to permissive.
• sudo setenforce 1 to set SELInux to enforcing
• getenforce to see if it's enforcing

To help troubleshooting you can use journalctl -t setroubleshoot, or just view the audit log directly in /var/log/audit/audit.log

If you have setroubleshoot installed, it will insert helpful messages into the journal... they even give you commands to run so that you can allow the actions SElinux previously denied. 

For example:

If you believe that (krusty-program) should be allowed read_thing access on the krusty-home directory by default.
  Then you should report this as a bug.
  You can generate a local policy module to allow this access.
  Do
     allow this access for now by executing:
     # ausearch -c '(krusty-program)' --raw | audit2allow -M my-krusty-program
     # semodule -X 300 -i my-krusty-program.pp

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[NotThePainter]

I gave up on chatgpt.com for technical matters. It is just wrong too often. (BTW, my background is a retried software engineer.)

Go over to gemini, much better. The free tier is pretty limiting, but the "Thinking" tier gets most done. I had great success in getting my station setup, not so great in getting a weird failure debugged (website updating, but wunderground not!)

[Warren Gill]

BTW the EPEL repos are not dangerous. But on Fedora you shouldn't need them anyway. EPEL repos are for Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to get newer packages that normally only Fedora gets.