Installing EPrints on RHEL/Fedora/CentOS
Contents
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, using yum (or dnf in RHEL/CentOS 8+ and more recent Fedora versions) install epel-release package so eprints RPM dependencies can be met from the EPEL repository where necessary:
yum install epel-release dnf install epel-release
- 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 one of the following commands to download the cache for this new package repositories. You may be prompted to accept the GPG key for the EPEL repository:
yum makecache dnf makecache
- Finally, install EPrints using yum (or dnf):
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.
