EPrints 3.5.0 Release Candidate 1

This page provides information about the first release candidate for EPrints 3.5.0 on Friday 19th June 2026, as can be found at https://github.com/eprints/eprints3.5/releases/tag/v3.5.0-rc1.

We invite the EPrints Community to test RC1, please report any issues you may find on GitHub, see below on how to do this.

There may be further release candidates before the official release, but we do not anticipate any large scale changes.

Installation Instructions

Red Hat Enterprise Linux / Rocky Linux 9

1. Install and enable MariaDB (you may choose to install MySQL instead).

yum install mariadb-server mariadb
systemctl enable --now mariadb

2. Install The EPEL package repository and the subscription-manager and then enable the Code Ready Builder package repository

yum install epel-release
yum config-manager --enable crb 

3. Install prerequite packages and tools. (Some extra packages may be required to build CPAN packages later on).

yum install git libxml2 libxslt httpd mod_perl mod_ssl openssl-devel perl-DBD-MySQL tetex-latex wget gzip tar ImageMagick elinks poppler-utils chkconfig unzip cpan python3-html2text expat-devel libxslt-devel xapian-core xapian-core-devel

4. Add the eprints user

adduser eprints

5. Add the eprints user to the apache group and vice-versa

usermod -a -G eprints apache
usermod -a -G apache eprints

6. For now disable SELinux. (If you want to make this permanent you will need to configure /etc/selinux/config and change SELINUX=permissive). An SELinux policy for EPrints will be provided with the full release of EPrints 3.5.0.

setenforce 0

7. Make a directory to checkout EPrints and set appropriate permissions:

mkdir /opt/eprints3
chown eprints:eprints /opt/eprints3
chmod 2775 /opt/eprints3

8. Become the eprints user and clone EPrints 3.5 recursively and checkout v3.5.0-rc1

su eprints
cd /opt/eprints3
git clone https://github.com/eprints/eprints3.5.git --recurse-submodules .

# if you wish to use changes since RC1, skip this line
git checkout v3.5.0-rc1

9. Become the root user again and install CPAN modules. (Answer 'y' if prompted whilst running cpan_modules.pl). This could take 10 minutes or more to complete but ensures you get modules tested against this version of EPrints. It is worth running cpan_modules.pl a second time after it completes, to get a better idea if all CPAN modules have been installed successfully.

su root
/opt/eprints3/cpan_modules.pl

10. Be sure to either set a password for the MariaDB root user or create another user (e.g. eprints) that can create new databases and add new MariaDB users

mysql
CREATE USER 'eprints'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED by '<CHANGE_ME>';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'eprints'@'localhost' WITH GRANT OPTION;

11. Become the eprints user again and create your new EPrints archive using the 'pub' flavour and then follow the interactive instructions.

su eprints
/opt/eprints3/bin/epadmin create

12. Become the root user and create an Apache configuration file at /etc/httpd/conf.d/eprints.conf with the following line:

Include /opt/eprints3/cfg/apache.conf

13. For now, disable /etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf

mv /etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf /etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf.disabled

14. Test and start Apache..

apachectl configtest
systemctl enable --now httpd

15. Start EPrints indexer. This can be done either via the System Tools tab on the Admin page in the web interface or with the following command:

/opt/eprints3/bin/indexer start

Ubuntu 24.04 / Debian 13 (Trixie)

N.B. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is not yet supported due to issue with libxml2.

To be written

Potential Gotchas

1. If you are looking to import some EPrints 3.4 data into your new 3v5:

EPrints 3.5 new Contributions field supersedes fields like Creators, Editors, Corporate Creators, Contributors. It will write value back to these legacy fields but if you try to import EP3XML exported from an EPrints 3.4 repository it will not map these legacy fields into the Contributions field. If you want to import a load of EPrints 3.4 records for testing, then be sure to disable the Contributions field in your archive's the eprint workflow before doing this import. (You may need to copy the workflow file from /opt/eprints3/flavours/pub_lib/workflows/eprint/default/core.xml to your archive's cfg/workflows/eprint/ directory before editing this file to disable the Contributions field.

Reporting Issues

We have create a parent issue on GitHub to list all issues with this release candidate. We will then create sub-issues as appropriate to tackle item individual in this list. If you add an issue on GitHub specific to this release candidate we will look to reference this from this parent issue.

To switch from testing RC1 to testing out master, as the eprints user

 cd /opt/eprints3
 git checkout master
 git pull --recurse-submodules