1. Preamble: referenced user accounts

In subsequent sections, we will refer to a number of different accounts, as follows:

  • Linux user accounts:

    • The user Linux account is the account that you use to log onto the Linux system as a regular user.

    • The root Linux account is an account that has system administrator privileges. On Debian and Fedora you can switch to this account from your user account by issuing the su - command and entering the password for the root account when prompted. On Ubuntu you can switch to this account from your user account using the sudo su - command and entering the password for your user account when prompted.

    • The opensrf Linux account is an account that you create when installing OpenSRF. You can switch to this account from the root account by issuing the su - opensrf command.

    • The postgres Linux account is created automatically when you install the PostgreSQL database server. You can switch to this account from the root account by issuing the su - postgres command.

  • PostgreSQL user accounts:

    • The evergreen PostgreSQL account is a superuser account that you will create to connect to the PostgreSQL database server.

  • Evergreen administrator account:

    • The egadmin Evergreen account is an administrator account for Evergreen that you will use to test connectivity and configure your Evergreen instance.

2. Preamble: developer instructions

Note
 Skip this section if you are using an official release tarball downloaded from http://evergreen-ils.org/egdownloads

Developers working directly with the source code from the Git repository, rather than an official release tarball, must install some extra packages and perform one step before they can proceed with the ./configure step.

As the root Linux account, install the following packages:

  • autoconf

  • automake

  • libtool

As the user Linux account, issue the following command in the Evergreen source directory to generate the configure script and Makefiles:

autoreconf -i

3. Installing prerequisites

  • PostgreSQL: Version 9.3 is recommended. The minimum supported version is 9.1.

  • Linux: Evergreen 2.8 has been tested on Debian Jessie (8.0), Debian Wheezy (7.0), Debian Squeeze(6.0), Ubuntu Trusty Tahr (14.04), Ubuntu Precise Pangolin (12.04), and Fedora. If you are running an older version of these distributions, you may want to upgrade before upgrading Evergreen. For instructions on upgrading these distributions, visit the Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora websites.

  • OpenSRF: The minimum supported version of OpenSRF is 2.4.0.

Evergreen has a number of prerequisite packages that must be installed before you can successfully configure, compile, and install Evergreen.

  1. Begin by installing the most recent version of OpenSRF (2.4.0 or later). You can download OpenSRF releases from http://evergreen-ils.org/opensrf-downloads/

  2. On many distributions, it is necessary to install PostgreSQL 9.1+ from external repositories.

    • On Debian Squeeze, open /etc/apt/sources.list in a text editor as the root Linux account and add the following line: 

      deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports squeeze-backports main contrib

    • Ubuntu Precise and Trusty comes with PostgreSQL 9.1+, so no additional steps are required.

    • Fedora 19 and 20 come with PostgreSQL 9.2+, so no additional steps are required.

  3. On Debian and Ubuntu, run aptitude update as the root Linux account to retrieve the new packages from the backports repository.

  4. Issue the following commands as the root Linux account to install prerequisites using the Makefile.install prerequisite installer, substituting debian-jessie, debian-wheezy, debian-squeeze, fedora, ubuntu-trusty, or ubuntu-precise for <osname> below: 

    make -f Open-ILS/src/extras/Makefile.install <osname>

  5. Add the libdbi-libdbd libraries to the system dynamic library path by issuing the following commands as the root Linux account:

    Note
    		 You should skip this step if installing on Ubuntu Precise, Trusty or Debian Jessie. The ubuntu and Debian Jessie targets use libdbd-pgsql from packages.
    Debian Wheezy
    echo "/usr/local/lib/dbd" > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/eg.conf
ldconfig
    Fedora
    echo "/usr/lib64/dbd" > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/eg.conf
ldconfig

4. Configuration and compilation instructions

For the time being, we are still installing everything in the /openils/ directory. From the Evergreen source directory, issue the following commands as the user Linux account to configure and build Evergreen:

PATH=/openils/bin:$PATH ./configure --prefix=/openils --sysconfdir=/openils/conf
make

These instructions assume that you have also installed OpenSRF under /openils/. If not, please adjust PATH as needed so that the Evergreen configure script can find osrf_config.

5. Installation instructions

  1. Once you have configured and compiled Evergreen, issue the following command as the root Linux account to install Evergreen, build the server portion of the staff client, and copy example configuration files to /openils/conf. Change the value of the STAFF_CLIENT_STAMP_ID variable to match the version of the staff client that you will use to connect to the Evergreen server. 

    make STAFF_CLIENT_STAMP_ID=rel_2_7_7 install

  2. The server portion of the staff client expects http://hostname/xul/server to resolve. Issue the following commands as the root Linux account to create a symbolic link pointing to the server subdirectory of the server portion of the staff client that we just built using the staff client ID rel_name: 

    cd /openils/var/web/xul
ln -sf rel_name/server server

6. Change ownership of the Evergreen files

All files in the /openils/ directory and subdirectories must be owned by the opensrf user. Issue the following command as the root Linux account to change the ownership on the files:

chown -R opensrf:opensrf /openils

7. Additional Instructions for Developers

Note
 Skip this section if you are using an official release tarball downloaded from http://evergreen-ils.org/egdownloads

Developers working directly with the source code from the Git repository, rather than an official release tarball, need to install the Dojo Toolkit set of JavaScript libraries. The appropriate version of Dojo is included in Evergreen release tarballs. Developers should install the Dojo 1.3.3 version of Dojo by issuing the following commands as the opensrf Linux account:

wget http://download.dojotoolkit.org/release-1.3.3/dojo-release-1.3.3.tar.gz
tar -C /openils/var/web/js -xzf dojo-release-1.3.3.tar.gz
cp -r /openils/var/web/js/dojo-release-1.3.3/* /openils/var/web/js/dojo/.

8. Configure the Apache Web server

  1. Use the example configuration files in Open-ILS/examples/apache/ (for Apache versions below 2.4) or Open-ILS/examples/apache_24/ (for Apache versions 2.4 or greater) to configure your Web server for the Evergreen catalog, staff client, Web services, and administration interfaces. Issue the following commands as the root Linux account:

    Debian Wheezy and Ubuntu Precise
    cp Open-ILS/examples/apache/eg.conf       /etc/apache2/sites-available/
cp Open-ILS/examples/apache/eg_vhost.conf /etc/apache2/
cp Open-ILS/examples/apache/eg_startup    /etc/apache2/
# Now set up SSL
mkdir /etc/apache2/ssl
cd /etc/apache2/ssl
    Ubuntu Trusty and Debian Jessie
    cp Open-ILS/examples/apache_24/eg_24.conf       /etc/apache2/sites-available/eg.conf
cp Open-ILS/examples/apache_24/eg_vhost_24.conf /etc/apache2/eg_vhost.conf
cp Open-ILS/examples/apache/eg_startup          /etc/apache2/
# Now set up SSL
mkdir /etc/apache2/ssl
cd /etc/apache2/ssl
    Fedora
    cp Open-ILS/examples/apache_24/eg_24.conf       /etc/httpd/conf.d/
cp Open-ILS/examples/apache_24/eg_vhost_24.conf /etc/httpd/eg_vhost.conf
cp Open-ILS/examples/apache/eg_startup          /etc/httpd/
# Now set up SSL
mkdir /etc/httpd/ssl
cd /etc/httpd/ssl

  2. The openssl command cuts a new SSL key for your Apache server. For a production server, you should purchase a signed SSL certificate, but you can just use a self-signed certificate and accept the warnings in the staff client and browser during testing and development. Create an SSL key for the Apache server by issuing the following command as the root Linux account: 

    openssl req -new -x509 -days 365 -nodes -out server.crt -keyout server.key

  3. As the root Linux account, edit the eg.conf file that you copied into place.

    1. To enable access to the offline upload / execute interface from any workstation on any network, make the following change (and note that you must secure this for a production instance):

      • (Apache 2.2): Replace Allow from 10.0.0.0/8 with Allow from all

      • (Apache 2.4): Replace Require host 10.0.0.0/8 with Require all granted

    2. (Fedora): Change references from the non-existent /etc/apache2/ directory to /etc/httpd/.

  4. Change the user for the Apache server.

    • (Debian and Ubuntu): As the root Linux account, edit /etc/apache2/envvars. Change export APACHE_RUN_USER=www-data to export APACHE_RUN_USER=opensrf.

    • (Fedora): As the root Linux account , edit /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf. Change User apache to User opensrf.

  5. Configure Apache with performance settings appropriate for Evergreen:

    • (Debian and Ubuntu): As the root Linux account, edit /etc/apache2/apache2.conf:

    • (Fedora): As the root Linux account, edit /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf:

      1. Change KeepAliveTimeout to 1. Higher values reduce the chance of a request timing out unexpectedly, but increase the risk of using up all available Apache child processes.

      2. Optional: Change MaxKeepAliveRequests to 100

      3. (Debian Wheezy, Ubuntu Precise, and Fedora) Update the prefork configuration section to suit your environment. The following settings apply to a busy system: 

        <IfModule mpm_prefork_module>
   StartServers           20
   MinSpareServers         5
   MaxSpareServers        15
   MaxClients            150
   MaxRequestsPerChild 10000
</IfModule>

      4. (Ubuntu Trusty, Debian Jessie) As the root user, edit /etc/apache2/mods-available/mpm_prefork.conf to match the above values. Then, also as the root user, enable the mpm_prefork module by doing: 

        a2dismod mpm_event
a2enmod mpm_prefork

  6. (Fedora): As the root Linux account, edit the /etc/httpd/eg_vhost.conf file to change references from the non-existent /etc/apache2/ directory to /etc/httpd/.

  7. (Debian Wheezy and Ubuntu Precise): As the root Linux account, enable the Evergreen site: 

    a2dissite default  # OPTIONAL: disable the default site (the "It Works" page)
a2ensite eg.conf

    (Ubuntu Trusty, Debian Jessie):

    a2dissite 000-default  # OPTIONAL: disable the default site (the "It Works" page)
a2ensite eg.conf

  8. (Ubuntu): As the root Linux account, enable Apache to write to the lock directory; this is currently necessary because Apache is running as the opensrf user: 

    chown opensrf /var/lock/apache2

9. Configure OpenSRF for the Evergreen application

There are a number of example OpenSRF configuration files in /openils/conf/ that you can use as a template for your Evergreen installation. Issue the following commands as the opensrf Linux account:

cp -b /openils/conf/opensrf_core.xml.example /openils/conf/opensrf_core.xml
cp -b /openils/conf/opensrf.xml.example /openils/conf/opensrf.xml

When you installed OpenSRF, you created four Jabber users on two separate domains and edited the opensrf_core.xml file accordingly. Please refer back to the OpenSRF README and, as the opensrf Linux account, edit the Evergreen version of the opensrf_core.xml file using the same Jabber users and domains as you used while installing and testing OpenSRF.

Note
 The -b flag tells the cp command to create a backup version of the destination file. The backup version of the destination file has a tilde (~) appended to the file name, so if you have forgotten the Jabber users and domains, you can retrieve the settings from the backup version of the files.

eg_db_config, described in the following section, sets the database connection information in opensrf.xml for you.

10. Creating the Evergreen database

10.1. Setting up the PostgreSQL server

For production use, most libraries install the PostgreSQL database server on a dedicated machine. Therefore, by default, the Makefile.install prerequisite installer does not install the PostgreSQL 9 database server that is required by every Evergreen system. You can install the packages required by Debian or Ubuntu on the machine of your choice using the following commands as the root Linux account:

(Debian / Ubuntu / Fedora) Installing PostgreSQL server packages

Each OS build target provides the postgres server installation packages required for each operating system. To install Postgres server packages, use the make target postgres-server-<OSTYPE>. Choose the most appropriate command below based on your operating system.

make -f Open-ILS/src/extras/Makefile.install postgres-server-debian-jessie
make -f Open-ILS/src/extras/Makefile.install postgres-server-debian-wheezy
make -f Open-ILS/src/extras/Makefile.install postgres-server-debian-squeeze
make -f Open-ILS/src/extras/Makefile.install postgres-server-ubuntu-precise
make -f Open-ILS/src/extras/Makefile.install postgres-server-ubuntu-trusty
make -f Open-ILS/src/extras/Makefile.install postgres-server-fedora
(Fedora) Postgres initialization

Installing Postgres on Fedora also requires you to initialize the PostgreSQL cluster and start the service. Issue the following commands as the root user:

postgresql-setup initdb
systemctl start postgresql

For a standalone PostgreSQL server, install the following Perl modules for your distribution as the root Linux account:

(Ubuntu Precise)
cpan Rose::URI
(Debian "wheezy" and Ubuntu Trusty)

No extra modules required for these distributions.

(Fedora)
cpan Rose::URI

You need to create a PostgreSQL superuser to create and access the database. Issue the following command as the postgres Linux account to create a new PostgreSQL superuser named evergreen. When prompted, enter the new user’s password:

createuser -s -P evergreen
Enabling connections to the PostgreSQL database

Your PostgreSQL database may be configured by default to prevent connections, for example, it might reject attempts to connect via TCP/IP or from other servers. To enable TCP/IP connections from localhost, check your pg_hba.conf file, found in the /etc/postgresql/ directory on Debian and Ubuntu, and in the /var/lib/pgsql/data/ directory on Fedora. A simple way to enable TCP/IP connections from localhost to all databases with password authentication, which would be suitable for a test install of Evergreen on a single server, is to ensure the file contains the following entries before any "host … ident" entries:

host    all             all             ::1/128                 md5
host    all             all             127.0.0.1/32            md5

When you change the pg_hba.conf file, you will need to reload PostgreSQL to make the changes take effect. For more information on configuring connectivity to PostgreSQL, see http://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/static/auth-pg-hba-conf.html

10.2. Creating the Evergreen database and schema

Once you have created the evergreen PostgreSQL account, you also need to create the database and schema, and configure your configuration files to point at the database server. Issue the following command as the root Linux account from inside the Evergreen source directory, replacing <user>, <password>, <hostname>, <port>, and <dbname> with the appropriate values for your PostgreSQL database (where <user> and <password> are for the evergreen PostgreSQL account you just created), and replace <admin-user> and <admin-pass> with the values you want for the egadmin Evergreen administrator account:

perl Open-ILS/src/support-scripts/eg_db_config --update-config \
       --service all --create-database --create-schema --create-offline \
       --user <user> --password <password> --hostname <hostname> --port <port> \
       --database <dbname> --admin-user <admin-user> --admin-pass <admin-pass>

This creates the database and schema and configures all of the services in your /openils/conf/opensrf.xml configuration file to point to that database. It also creates the configuration files required by the Evergreen cgi-bin administration scripts, and sets the user name and password for the egadmin Evergreen administrator account to your requested values.

You can get a complete set of options for eg_db_config by passing the --help parameter.

10.3. Loading sample data

If you add the --load-all-sample parameter to the eg_db_config command, a set of authority and bibliographic records, call numbers, copies, staff and regular users, and transactions will be loaded into your target database. This sample dataset is commonly referred to as the concerto sample data, and can be useful for testing out Evergreen functionality and for creating problem reports that developers can easily recreate with their own copy of the concerto sample data.

10.4. Creating the database on a remote server

In a production instance of Evergreen, your PostgreSQL server should be installed on a dedicated server.

10.4.1. PostgreSQL 9.1 and later

To create the database instance on a remote database server running PostgreSQL 9.1 or later, simply use the --create-database flag on eg_db_config.

11. Starting Evergreen

  1. As the root Linux account, start the memcached and ejabberd services (if they aren’t already running): 

    /etc/init.d/ejabberd start
/etc/init.d/memcached start

  2. As the opensrf Linux account, start Evergreen. The -l flag in the following command is only necessary if you want to force Evergreen to treat the hostname as localhost; if you configured opensrf.xml using the real hostname of your machine as returned by perl -ENet::Domain 'print Net::Domain::hostfqdn() . "\n";', you should not use the -l flag. 

    osrf_control -l --start-all

    • If you receive the error message bash: osrf_control: command not found, then your environment variable PATH does not include the /openils/bin directory; this should have been set in the opensrf Linux account’s .bashrc configuration file. To manually set the PATH variable, edit the configuration file ~/.bashrc as the opensrf Linux account and add the following line: 

      export PATH=$PATH:/openils/bin

  3. As the opensrf Linux account, generate the Web files needed by the staff client and catalogue and update the organization unit proximity (you need to do this the first time you start Evergreen, and after that each time you change the library org unit configuration. ): 

    autogen.sh

  4. As the root Linux account, restart the Apache Web server: 

    /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

    If the Apache Web server was running when you started the OpenSRF services, you might not be able to successfully log in to the OPAC or staff client until the Apache Web server is restarted.

12. Testing connections to Evergreen

Once you have installed and started Evergreen, test your connection to Evergreen via srfsh. As the opensrf Linux account, issue the following commands to start srfsh and try to log onto the Evergreen server using the egadmin Evergreen administrator user name and password that you set using the eg_db_config command:

/openils/bin/srfsh
srfsh% login <admin-user> <admin-pass>

You should see a result like:

Received Data: "250bf1518c7527a03249858687714376"
------------------------------------
Request Completed Successfully
Request Time in seconds: 0.045286
------------------------------------
Received Data: {
   "ilsevent":0,
   "textcode":"SUCCESS",
   "desc":" ",
   "pid":21616,
   "stacktrace":"oils_auth.c:304",
   "payload":{
      "authtoken":"e5f9827cc0f93b503a1cc66bee6bdd1a",
      "authtime":420
   }
}
------------------------------------
Request Completed Successfully
Request Time in seconds: 1.336568
------------------------------------

If this does not work, it’s time to do some troubleshooting.

  • As the opensrf Linux account, run the settings-tester.pl script to see if it finds any system configuration problems. The script is found at Open-ILS/src/support-scripts/settings-tester.pl in the Evergreen source tree.

  • Follow the steps in the troubleshooting guide.

  • If you have faithfully followed the entire set of installation steps listed here, you are probably extremely close to a working system. Gather your configuration files and log files and contact the Evergreen development mailing list for assistance before making any drastic changes to your system configuration.

13. Getting help

Need help installing or using Evergreen? Join the mailing lists at http://evergreen-ils.org/communicate/mailing-lists/ or contact us on the Freenode IRC network on the #evergreen channel.

14. License

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.