This documentation has not been updated for Release 4.0.0 yet. Please see the one host (all-in-one) Manual Installation Instructions.
Intended as guidance for production environments with different hosts for most tasks, these instructions provide a recipe for building only the Web piece of an Avalon system from scratch on CentOS or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Recipes for the other components for Avalon may be found here. Fedora (standalone), MySQL (standalone), Solr (standalone), Red5 (standalone), and Matterhorn (standalone).
Instructions for building every component on one host (all-in-on) please see here: Manual Installation Instructions.
Ready the Installation Environment
Install EPEL
rpm -ivh http://linux.mirrors.es.net/fedora-epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
This package has libyaml-devel which is required by ruby and not provided by Redhat.
Make sure a valid hostname is resolvable
The default hostname is “avalon.dev”, so name the machine this and enter it into /etc/hosts
# hostname avalon.dev # cat /etc/hosts 127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.localdomain localhost4 localhost4.localdomain4 avalon.dev
Configure iptables
The Avalon Media System requires several ports to be open to client browsers.
Here are the port settings that will need to be configured:
| Port | Purpose | External? |
|---|---|---|
| 80 | HTTP (Avalon) | Yes |
The preferred method is to create a shell script that will do the work for you. Here is an example script that you should look through and customize as needed: avalon-iptables-config.sh
If you're connected over ssh, it might kick you off.
Save your script to /etc/sysconfig/avalon-iptables-config.sh, make it executable and run it.
chmod +x /etc/sysconfig/avalon-iptables-config.sh /etc/sysconfig/avalon-iptables-config.sh
If you run into connection issues you can disable the iptables, by running "service iptables stop". This will completely drop your firewall. When finished troubleshooting run "service iptables start".
Disable SELinux
echo 0 > /selinux/enforce vim /etc/selinux/config #change the value of `SELINUX` from `enforcing` to `permissive`
Add the NUL repository
Create the NUL repository config file:
vim /etc/yum.repos.d/nul-public.repo
Append the following code:
[nul_public] name=NUL Library Public RHEL repository baseurl=http://yumrepo-public.library.northwestern.edu/x86_64 enabled=1 gpgcheck=1 gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-nul cost=150
Install and place the NUL GPG key in the proper location:
curl http://yumrepo-public.library.northwestern.edu/RPM-GPG-KEY-nul -o /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-nul
Install development libraries and packages for building Ruby
yum groupinstall "Development Tools" yum install readline-devel zlib-devel libyaml-devel libffi-devel openssl-devel libxml2-devel libxslt-devel
HTTPD
Install and start the httpd service.
yum install httpd service httpd start
Add avalon user and create avalon directory.
useradd avalon mkdir /var/www/avalon chown -R avalon:avalon /var/www/avalon
Apache Passenger and Ruby
Change current user to avalon then install RVM and ruby 2.1.5.
su - avalon curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --ruby=2.1.5
Source the RVM shell (as avalon user)
source /home/avalon/.rvm/scripts/rvm
Install Passenger via Gem (as avalon user)
gem install passenger
Check to make sure passenger installed in the expected location (as avalon user)
$ passenger-config --root /home/avalon/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.5/gems/passenger-4.0.56
Install Passenger apache module requirements (as root)
su - root yum install curl-devel httpd httpd-devel apr-devel apr-util-devel
Build passenger for your version of Apache and Ruby (as avalon user)
su - avalon passenger-install-apache2-module #copy the suggested Apache configuration file settings for later
Create an apache configuration file (as root)
su - root vim /etc/httpd/conf.d/passenger.conf
Example contents of /etc/httpd/conf.d/passenger.conf:
LoadModule passenger_module /home/avalon/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.5/gems/passenger-4.0.56/buildout/apache2/mod_passenger.so <IfModule passenger_module> PassengerRoot /home/avalon/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.5/gems/passenger-4.0.56 PassengerDefaultRuby /home/avalon/.rvm/wrappers/ruby-2.1.5/ruby PassengerMaxPoolSize 30 PassengerPoolIdleTime 300 PassengerMaxInstancesPerApp 0 PassengerMinInstances 3 PassengerSpawnMethod smart-lv2 </IfModule>
Apache security configuration
wget https://raw.github.com/avalonmediasystem/config-files/master/sbin/avalon_auth -O /usr/local/sbin/avalon_auth chmod +x /usr/local/sbin/avalon_auth wget https://raw.github.com/avalonmediasystem/config-files/master/apache/10-mod_rewrite.conf -P /etc/httpd/conf.d/
Create a virtual host for avalon in /etc/httpd/conf.d/avalon.conf
wget https://raw.github.com/avalonmediasystem/config-files/master/apache/20-avalon.conf -P /etc/httpd/conf.d/ vim /etc/httpd/conf.d/20-avalon.conf
Add this line to 20-avalon under the VirtualHost tag:
RailsEnv development
Restart apache. With apache running, check passenger-status
/etc/init.d/httpd restart su - avalon which passenger-status #> ~/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.5/bin/passenger-status
Avalon
Grab Avalon code from github
cd ~ git clone git://github.com/avalonmediasystem/avalon.git cd avalon git checkout master #make sure you are in the master branch (should be by default) mv public/* /var/www/avalon/public/ mv * /var/www/avalon/
Configure Avalon
Create /var/www/avalon/config/setup_load_paths.rb and add:
if ENV['MY_RUBY_HOME'] && ENV['MY_RUBY_HOME'].include?('rvm')
begin
gems_path = ENV['MY_RUBY_HOME'].split(/@/)[0].sub(/rubies/,'gems')
ENV['GEM_PATH'] = "#{gems_path}:#{gems_path}@global"
require 'rvm'
RVM.use_from_path! File.dirname(File.dirname(__FILE__))
rescue LoadError
raise "RVM gem is currently unavailable."
end
end
# If you're not using Bundler at all, remove lines bellow
ENV['BUNDLE_GEMFILE'] = File.expand_path('../Gemfile', File.dirname(__FILE__))
require 'bundler/setup'
cd /var/www/avalon/config cp authentication.yml.example authentication.yml
Configure database settings
vim database.yml
Replace database.yml with the correct values for your development environment
development: adapter: mysql2 host: localhost database: rails username: rails password: rails pool: 5 timeout: 5000
Install the mysql2 adapter
su - root yum install mysql-devel su - avalon gem install activerecord-mysql2-adapter gem install mysql2 su - root vim /var/www/avalon/Gemfile
Add this line to the Gemfile
gem 'mysql2', '~>0.3.11'
If you are using mysql instead of sqllite (as is done throughout this document), then comment out the following lines in the Gemfile
# gem 'activerecord-jdbcsqlite3-adapter' # gem 'jdbc-sqlite3' # gem 'sqlite3'
Run the bundle install
Install additional dependencies
yum install rubygem-json cmake
Run bundler
su - avalon cd /var/www/avalon gem update debugger-ruby_core_source bundle install
Finish configuring Avalon
Edit /var/www/avalon/config/solr.yml
development:
url: http://localhost:8983/solr/
Edit /var/www/avalon/config/fedora.yml
development:
user: fedoraAdmin
password: fedoraPassword
url: http://127.0.0.1:8983/fedora
Create /var/www/avalon/config/matterhorn.yml
development: url: http://matterhorn_system_account:CHANGE_ME@localhost:8080/
Create /var/www/avalon/config/avalon.yml and base it off of /var/www/avalon/config/avalon.yml.example. Consult the documentation to customize this file for your installation.
development:
dropbox:
path: '/var/avalon/dropbox/'
upload_uri: 'sftp://localhost/var/avalon/dropbox'
username: 'test'
password: 'test'
notification_email_address: ''
Create the database using rake
su - avalon cd /var/www/avalon rake db:create
If you get an error message saying that you can't connect to the database, take a look at this post and follow some of the troubleshooting steps.
Run the database migrations
rake db:migrate
Set rails environment to development, if it has not defaulted to this. On the first line of /var/www/avalon/config/environment.rb make sure it says 'development'
ENV['RAILS_ENV'] ||= 'development'
Visit your new Avalon site!
You should be able to visit the webpage with just the hostname (ie http://localhost)
Click on "Sign in" in the upper right corner of the website main page. Set up a default identity with the following properties.
archivist1@example.com password/password
This is a known identity with administrative privileges.
Start delayed_job
As avalon run
cd /var/www/avalon/ bundle exec rake delayed_job:start
Delayed Job handles background jobs. DelayedJob logs to log/delayed_job.log in the avalon directory.
Using the System
You can find specific information about using the system in the Collection Manager's Guide. Upload items individually or via batch. Sample content is available for your convenience.
Known Issues - a list of bugs, workarounds, and cautions.
Restarting the Server
Before you restart your Avalon server, you'll want to make sure all of the services necessary to run Avalon will start automatically after the restart. Run these commands once and you should be set:
chkconfig --level 345 sshd on chkconfig --level 345 httpd on