Installing EPrints on RHEL/Fedora/CentOS

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 3.3.x RPM

Please note that rpm.eprints.org is no longer fully supported. The below instructions should still work for installing EPrints 3.3.x on RHEL/CentOS 6 and 7 and comparable versions of Fedora. If they do not work the latest EPrints RPM can be downloaded at http://files.eprints.org/

Add the rpm.eprints.org repository key:

rpm -ivh http://rpm.eprints.org/rpm-eprints-org-key-1-1.noarch.rpm

Next, add the rpm.eprints.org EPrints repository:

rpm -ivh http://rpm.eprints.org/eprints/noarch/rpm-eprints-org-1-1.noarch.rpm

Note: if these fail to connect to the repository and you have a proxy server, try adding the parameter "--httpproxy http://your.proxy.address" (export http_proxy doesn't affect rpm call)

Install required XML libraries (Use yum upgrade if these are already installed):

yum install libxml2 libxslt perl-XML-LibXML perl-XML-LibXSLT

Finally, install EPrints 3:

yum install eprints 

Installing EPrints 3.3.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 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/eprints.git /opt/eprints3
cd /opt/eprints3/
git checkout tags/v3.3.16
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 with Installing EPrints on RHEL 6

RHEL / CentOS 8

Issues with Installing EPrints on RHEL 8