Configuration orientation

This page is under development as part of the EPrints 3.4 manual. It may still contain content specific to earlier versions.

You've just installed EPrints 3 and created a repository, and now you're keen to get started on customising it. Before diving into the how-tos, take some time to read through this brief orientation guide and familiarise yourself with the EPrints configuration landscape.

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Where are the configuration files?

The default installation directory for EPrints is:

/opt/eprints3/

(you may have chosen a different installation directory when you installed EPrints).

There are several sub-directories at this level, but from a configuration perspective we are interested only in the lib directory and the archives directories. Before looking at the contents of these directories, we need to understand the concepts of global and repository-specific (or sometimes local) configuration.

Global vs Local configuration

A single installation of EPrints on a server can run multiple repositories, which may each be very different in style and functionality. Therefore, EPrints divides its many configuration files into two default sets: global configuration files and repository-specific configuration files. Multiple repositories under the same installation of EPrints share the global configuration files, but each repository has its own set of repository-specific configuration files.

EPrints strikes a sensible balance between the two. The default global set contains the configuration options that you are probably least likely to need to change (although this is by no means set in stone - you can override a global configuration setting for a specific repository if you need to), whereas the repository-specific sets, on the other hand, contain the most often tweaked configuration settings.

What about everything else? The EPrints installation directory contains several other files and directories, which are described in the EPrints Directory Structure section of the Technical Reference.

The lib directory

The lib directory is where the global configuration files are kept.

• citations (rendering rules) for saved searches, subjects and users
• english language phrases for system things
• static content
  • robots.txt
  • favicon.ico
  • information page about EPrints
  • javascript (autocompletion, pop up preview, display effects) auto loaded
  • images (EPrints logo and other logos used by the about page)
  • XSL stylesheets for XML output (e.g OAI)
  • stylesheets (some auto loaded)
• themes
• saved search workflow
• XHTML entities for use in static content pages, template e.g. © for copyright

The lib directory also contains the defaultcfg subdirectory. This is the default copy of all the configuration files that make up the repository-specific configuration. When you create a new repository, a copy of all the files in the defaultcfg directory are copied to the repository-specific configuration directory, which is covered in the next section.

The archives directory

Each repository under the same installation of EPrints has its own subdirectory (named after the repository ID specified when creating the repository) under the archives directory. Each of these subdirectories contain the repository-specific configuration files (amongst other files) for that particular repository.