Solved: How to install Python ibm_db DB2 driver on RHEL

Solved:  Installing Python's DB2 module (ibm_db) on Linux

Problem 1:  I kept getting a message about not having include files installed.  First, I had to get a sysadmin to install the files.  But, he didn't finish the job, quite.  I had to soft link it myself.  That is, the include files are installed by default in /opt/ibm/db2/V10.1, but linked to from /opt/db2inst/sqllib.  So:

$ sudo ln -s /opt/ibm/db2/V10.1/include /opt/db2inst/sqllib/include

That solved the include problem.

Problem 2:  I was installing IBM's DB2 python driver on a RHEL 6.2 linux box, but I kept getting the message:

Detected 64-bit Python
Environment variable IBM_DB_HOME is not set. Set it to your DB2/IBM_Data_Server_Driver installation directory and retry ibm_db module install.

This was despite executing the userprofile script in /opt/db2inst/sqllib/userprofile, which set the environment vars properly: 

xxxxx@xxxxxx:~/making/ibm_db-2.0.4.1$ env | egrep -i ibm
IBM_DB_LIB=/opt/db2inst1/sqllib/lib
IBM_DB_DIR=/opt/db2inst1/sqllib
IBM_DB_HOME=/home/db2inst1/sqllib
IBM_DB_INCLUDE=/opt/db2inst1/sqllib/include

Dammit!  I couldn't get past this.  I tried both

• sudo easy_install ibm_db 
• sudo pip install ibm_db

This was to no avail.  I even tried putting the whole thing in a bash script and doing the export IBM_DB_LIB stuff there.  Again, failure.

Finally, I downloaded the source and did the python setup.py build, which worked, so I was halfway there.  Then, I had to do the sudo setup.py install (since it was to be installed in system directories):  Failure (with above message about missing IBM_DB_HOME environment variable).  But, I could do the env and see the vars there!  So, since I'm doing this from source, I edited setup.py and put a pprint in, showing the os.envoron.  This made it obvious.  It showed I was executing as sudo, so as root, and root didn't have the userprofile being executed, so not var was being set.

Quick:  "man sudo" !!

SOLUTION:  It shows that to do this right, you must invoke sudo with -E to keep the environment variables from the current environment.

$ sudo -E python setup.py install

Hurray!  Installed!