Installing EPrints on RHEL/Fedora/CentOS

Security Notice

• EPrints 3.4.2 has several known vulnerabilities that can be patched with the patch file at https://files.eprints.org/2548/. This will be required whatever means of installation is used in the instructions below.

Requirements

• RedHat Enterprise (RHEL) / CentOS 7 or Fedora 25+. These instructions will more than likely work for RHEL / CentOS 6 but have not been as thoroughly tested.

• Pre-installed MySQL server and client.
  • RHEL / Fedora:

yum install mysql-server mysql

• • CentOS:

yum install mariadb-server mariadb

Installing from EPrints RPM

The below instructions should still work for installing EPrints up to v3.3.15 on RHEL/CentOS 6 and 7 and comparable versions of Fedora.

Installing from rpm.eprints.org

Please note that rpm.eprints.org is no longer fully supported and packages are no longer signed. It is planned to start signing packages again in the future but there have been some issues with the signing keys.

• As root, edit /etc/yum.repos.d/eprints.repo and add the following (If you want to install EPrints 3.4 rather than EPrints 3.3 change the baseurl to http://rpm.eprints.org/eprints3.4):

[eprints]
name=EPrints Repository Software - $basearch
baseurl=http://rpm.eprints.org/eprints
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0

• As root, now run the following command to download the cache for this new YUM repository (or dnf in RHEL/CentOS 8+ and more recent Fedora versions)

yum makecache
dnf makecache

• Finally, install EPrints using yum

yum install eprints
dnf install eprints

Installing RPM locally

• Download latest RPM for EPrints 3.3 or 3.4 from http://files.eprints.org/

• Then install EPrints using yum (or dnf in RHEL/CentOS 8+ and more recent Fedora versions) substituting for the filename of the file you downloaded from files.eprints.org

yum install eprints-3.3.16-1.el7.rpm
dnf install eprints-3.4.2-1.el7.pm

Installing EPrints 3.4.x from Source

N.B. Installing from source is generally discouraged particularly for production repositories. However, if want to develop the EPrints code or a plugin or Bazaar package it may be useful to install from source, ideally from EPrints Core Git repository.

First, install the EPEL YUM package repository and run yum repolist to ensure the GPG key is installed:

yum install epel-release
yum repolist

Now, install all the dependencies that would be installed through the eprints RPM.

yum install libxml2 libxslt httpd mod_perl perl-DBI perl-DBD-MySQL perl-IO-Socket-SSL perl-Time-HiRes \
    perl-CGI perl-Digest-MD5 perl-Digest-SHA perl-JSON perl-XML-LibXML perl-XML-LibXSLT perl-XML-SAX \
    perl-MIME-Lite perl-Text-Unidecode perl-JSON perl-Unicode-Collate perl-Pod-LaTeX perl-LWP-Protocol-https \ 
    tetex-latex wget gzip tar ImageMagick elinks poppler-utils chkconfig unzip cpan

Next, create the eprints user

adduser eprints

Next, clone the Git repository from GitHub to /opt/ and set the eprints user as the owner. It is probably best to checkout the latest release rather than using HEAD, which may have known issues:

yum install git
git clone https://github.com/eprints/eprints3.4.git /opt/eprints3
cd /opt/eprints3/
git checkout tags/v3.4.1
chown -R eprints:eprints . 

Next, as the eprints user copy /opt/eprints3/perl_lib/EPrints/SystemSettings.pm.tmpl to /opt/eprints3/perl_lib/Eprints/SystemSettings.pm

EPrints is now fully installed at /opt/eprints3. However, you will not yet have a running archive. Follow the Getting Started with EPrints 3 instructions to set this up.

Now update Apache configuration to set it up to use the eprints user and group, by ensuring the following lines are set thus in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf:

User  eprints
Group eprints

Now add the file /etc/httpd/conf.d/eprints.conf with the following line:

Include /opt/eprints3/cfg/apache.conf

There is a good chance your operating system will have SELinux enabled. If so, follow the instructions under Troubleshooting for how to let EPrints do what it needs to do through SELinux.

Finally, restart Apache:

 service httpd restart

You should now be able to access your vanilla repository at the hostname you specified when running epadmin create from the Getting Started with EPrints 3 instructions. You should then login as the admin user you created during this process and turn on the indexer. This can be done by clicking on the Admin link under the Logged in menu, then clicking on the System Tools tab and finally the Start Indexer button.

Non-critical Dependencies

Some of EPrints non-core functionality may not work out of the box as these dependencies are not included as part of the RPM. Here is a list of known additional packages (and the YUM repositories in which they can be found) or CPAN modules than can be installed.

Some of these known additional packages are only available through the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) YUM repository, which can be installed as the root user as follows:

yum -y install epel-release
yum repolist 

CPAN modules should be installed using the cpan command as the root user.

• perl-Geo-IP (epel) - Allows IRstats2 to determine the location of views/downloads for publications.]
• perl-Spreadsheet-WriteExcel (epel) - To allow Multiline Excel export.
• CPAN module Text::Refer - Required for EndNote import.
• CPAN module TeX::Encode Required for BibTex export.
• perl-Image-ExifTool (epel) - Sometimes needed to support generation of thumbnails for uploaded documents/images.
• perl-LWP-Protocol-https (base) - Needed by DataCite plugin to register repository DOIs.

Next steps

Configure eprints per Getting_Started_with_EPrints_3.

Operating System Version Specific Requirements

RHEL / CentOS 6

Issues when following Installing_EPrints_on_RHEL/Fedora/CentOS#Installing_from_EPrints_3.3.x_RPM.

Error installing eprints:

--> Processing Dependency: perl(Apache::DBI) for package: eprints-3.3.15-1.el6.noarch
--> Finished Dependency Resolution
Error: Package: eprints-3.3.15-1.el6.noarch (rpm-eprints-org)
           Requires: perl(Apache::DBI)
 You could try using --skip-broken to work around the problem
 You could try running: rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest

Solution is a missing package from EPEL. Add EPEL to yums configuration then installing the missing package.

yum install epel-release
yum install perl-Apache-DBI

RHEL / CentOS 7

No significant issues.

RHEL / CentOS 8

elinks package is no longer available

The RPM package elinks is no longer available in RHEL / CentOS / Rocky 8 even with EPEL package repository. elinks is only needed if are intending to upload web pages or XML files and these need to be indexed by EPrints, so if installing from source use the following DNF command line:

dnf install libxml2 libxslt httpd mod_perl perl-DBI perl-DBD-MySQL perl-IO-Socket-SSL perl-Time-HiRes \
   perl-CGI perl-Digest-MD5 perl-Digest-SHA perl-JSON perl-XML-LibXML perl-XML-LibXSLT perl-XML-SAX \
   perl-MIME-Lite perl-Text-Unidecode perl-JSON perl-Unicode-Collate perl-Pod-LaTeX tetex-latex wget \
   gzip tar ImageMagick poppler-utils chkconfig unzip cpan

Alternatively, for RHEL 8 you can enable the codeready-builder repository, which still has elinks available:

subscription-manager repos --enable "codeready-builder-for-rhel-8-$(arch)-rpms"

If you are running CentOS 8 (or Rocky 8) you can similarly enable the powertools repository:

dnf config-manager --set-enabled powertools

perl-IO-String package is no longer available

The RPM package perl-IO-String is no longer available in RHEL / CentOS / Rocky 8 even with EPEL package repository. You can enable the codeready-builder repository, which still has perl-IO-String available:

subscription-manager repos --enable "codeready-builder-for-rhel-8-$(arch)-rpms"

If you are running CentOS 8 (or Rocky 8) you can similarly enable the powertools repository:

dnf config-manager --set-enabled powertools

Sub-dependency packages perl-MIME-Types and perl-Digest-SHA1 are no longer available

perl-MIME-Lite package requires perl-MIME-Types package and perl-Apache-DBI requires perl-Digest-SHA1 package neither of which available on RHEL / CentOS / Rocky 8, even with EPEL repository enabled. You can enable the codeready-builder repository, which still has these packahes available:

subscription-manager repos --enable "codeready-builder-for-rhel-8-$(arch)-rpms"

If you are running CentOS 8 (or Rocky 8) you can similarly enable the powertools repository:

dnf config-manager --set-enabled powertools

Compatibility issues with XML::LibXSLT

Installing XML::LibXSLT either through the perl-XML-LibXSLT RPM or CPAN causes httpd to generate a segmentation fault when you try to start it. The most straightfarward solution to this is to run httpd in mpm-prefork rather than mpm-event mode. This can be acheived by editing /etc/httpd/conf.modules.d/00-mpm.conf and commenting out the following line:

LoadModule mpm_event_module modules/mod_mpm_event.so

and uncommenting the mpm-prefork line:

LoadModule mpm_prefork_module modules/mod_mpm_prefork.so

The alternative solution is to make sure that XML::LibXSLT is not installed through the perl-XML-LibXSLT RPM or CPAN. EPrints will still run without this but you will not be able to use XSLT-based import plugins. Unless you have installed any additional import plugins, the only ones affected are Atom XML and OpenXML Bibliography.

Troubleshooting

• Advice for enabling SELinux with EPrints