Easier MusicBrainz NGS database setup

Some time ago I wrote a couple of tools that help me set up and update a mirror of the MusicBrainz database on the Acoustid server. It turned out to be work really well. Recently I’ve seen a few people struggling with setting up the NGS database using the original server codebase. The official route assumes you are going to run a MB server instance, which makes things a little bit more complicated than it has to be. You have to install a number Perl modules, you have to compile the MusicBrainz-specific PostgreSQL extensions, even though you most likely don’t need them, you are forced to setup a musicbrainz_db_raw database that you are definitely not going to use, because there is no data in it, etc.

If you just want to have a local copy of the MB NGS database, don’t want to mess with CPAN or compiling PostgreSQL extensions, you can try the NGS version of mbslave. You only need Python, psycopg2 and PostgreSQL. The number of steps you have to do manually is probably larger than with the official way, but on any Unix-based OS it should be just copy&paste; from the README file and it should really just work, with the benefit of being able to customize everything.