# Lsbeat blog instructions fail

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/lsbeat-blog-instructions-fail/72016>\
**Category:** Beats\
**Created:** [January 18, 2017, 1:57pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/lsbeat-blog-instructions-fail/72016 "2017-01-18T13:57:00Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![johnzachary](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/johnzachary/32/14683_2.png) [@johnzachary](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/johnzachary)\
**Post date:** [January 18, 2017, 1:57pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/lsbeat-blog-instructions-fail/72016/1 "2017-01-18T13:57:00Z")

</div>

Hello!

The blog instructions at [https://www.elastic.co/blog/build-your-own-beat](https://www.elastic.co/blog/build-your-own-beat) need to be updated.

First, the current directory structure of a skeleton Beat using `cookiecutter` is the following:

```auto
  .
    ├── CONTRIBUTING.md
    ├── LICENSE
    ├── Makefile
    ├── README.md
    ├── _meta
    │ ├── beat.yml
    │ └── fields.yml
    ├── beater
    │ └── mybeat.go
    ├── config
    │ ├── config.go
    │ └── config_test.go
    ├── docs
    │ └── index.asciidoc
    ├── main.go
    ├── main_test.go
    ├── mybeat.template.json
    └── tests
        └── system
            ├── config
            │ └── mybeat.yml.j2
            ├── mybeat.py
            ├── requirements.txt
            └── test_base.py

    7 directories, 17 files

```

Also, the instruction `git checkout 5.1` causes an error when running `make setup` for the first time:

```auto
File "./vendor/github.com/elastic/beats/libbeat/scripts/generate_index_pattern.py", line 38
    print "ERROR: Field", path, "is duplicated. Please delete it and try again. Fields already are", unique_fields
                           ^
SyntaxError: Missing parentheses in call to 'print'

```

This error does not happen if the `master` branch is checked out.

John

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![ruflin](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/ruflin/32/3116_2.png) [@ruflin](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/ruflin)\
**Post date:** [January 19, 2017, 10:03am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/lsbeat-blog-instructions-fail/72016/2 "2017-01-19T10:03:42Z")

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That seems to be our constant issue related to Python 2.7 and 3.x. We do all our work and testing on 2.7. Unfortunately we state (well hidden) in our Contributor guide ([https://github.com/elastic/beats/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#update-scripts](https://github.com/elastic/beats/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#update-scripts)) \>= 2.7.9 but we should state \>= 2.7.9 and \< 3.0 even though we try to keep the two compatible. Also in the blog post we don't have any Python requirements unfortunately.

As this problem will keep us bugging I see some potential solutions:

- We update our requirement to python 3.0. Problem is that lots of distros still ship 2.7 ☹
- We find a way to automatically check compatibilty and perhaps even automate compatibility. I found this one here: [https://docs.python.org/2/library/2to3.html](https://docs.python.org/2/library/2to3.html)
- Use virtualenv to also install a specific python version. We use virtualenv for most things, so this could help. Need to check if this is possible.

I opened this PR here to see if the automated way works: [https://github.com/elastic/beats/pull/3408](https://github.com/elastic/beats/pull/3408)

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![ruflin](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/ruflin/32/3116_2.png) [@ruflin](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/ruflin)\
**Post date:** [January 19, 2017, 10:07am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/lsbeat-blog-instructions-fail/72016/3 "2017-01-19T10:07:42Z")

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Only indirectly related to this, but an other thing which could be helpful for us is introducing something like a `check-environment` script that checks if the correct versions of the tools like golang or python are installed, because that is an issue we hit frequently.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [February 8, 2017, 1:56pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/lsbeat-blog-instructions-fail/72016/4 "2017-02-08T13:56:59Z")

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