Installing EPrints on Debian/Ubuntu

Requirements

• Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (non-LTS versions not recommended)
• Debian 11 (Bullseye), Debian 12 (Bookworm) or Debian 13 (Trixie) - These are not as comprehensively tested as Ubuntu LTS versions.

Dependencies and Pre-configuration

The ideal way to install from source is via git using the Core Git repositories EPrints 3.4 or EPrints 3.3, and installing from a source tarball is generally discouraged.

Installing from source via git is now the recommended way to install EPrints for production repositories, after having proved to be a useful installation method to those seeking to develop the EPrints code, develop a plugin or develop a Bazaar package too.

First, as the root user install all the dependencies for EPrints (N.B. Some dependencies may not be able in certain versions of Debian/Ubuntu. See Operating System Version Specific Requirements towards the end of this page):

apt install perl libncurses6 libselinux1 apache2 libapache2-mod-perl2 libxml-libxml-perl \
  libunicode-string-perl libterm-readkey-perl libmime-lite-perl libmime-types-perl libdigest-sha-perl \
  libdbd-mysql-perl libxml-parser-perl libxml2-dev libxml-twig-perl libarchive-any-perl libjson-perl \
  liblwp-protocol-https-perl libtext-unidecode-perl lynx wget ghostscript poppler-utils antiword elinks \
  texlive-base texlive-binaries psutils imagemagick adduser tar gzip unzip libsearch-xapian-perl \
  libtex-encode-perl libio-string-perl python3-html2text make libexpat1-dev libxslt1-dev

If you are installing on Ubuntu, install MySQL server and client:

 apt install mysql-server mysql-client libmysqlclient-dev

If you are installing on Debian, install MariaDB server and client:

 apt install mariadb-server mariadb-client libmariadb-dev

Next, create the eprints user

adduser eprints

Now add the eprints user to the www-data group and vice-versa

usermod -a -G eprints www-data
usermod -a -G www-data eprints

Downloading and Deploying EPrints Source

Create initial directory with correct permissions

As root:

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

Cloning from Git

apt install git
su eprints
git clone https://github.com/eprints/eprints3.4.git /opt/eprints3
cd /opt/eprints3/
git checkout tags/v3.4.7

Configuration

Next, as the eprints user copy EPRINTS_PATH/perl_lib/EPrints/SystemSettings.pm.tmpl to EPRINTS_PATH/perl_lib/EPrints/SystemSettings.pm, if it does not already exist.

EPRINTS_PATH should now always be /opt/eprints3. However, historically other paths have been used when EPrints was available as a Deb package.

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

Post-configuration

Next, add the file /etc/apache2/sites-available/eprints.conf with the following line:

Include EPRINTS_PATH/cfg/apache.conf

To enable this as root run the command:

root> a2ensite eprints

Also it may be necessary to disable the default site otherwise the default Apache page will still be shown:

a2dissite 000-default

Finally, restart Apache:

service apache2 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.

Operating System Version Specific Requirements

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

N.B. It is assumed that you are installing the latest version of 3.4. Earlier versions may have issues not listed here.

NO CURRENT ISSUES

Previous issues

libsepol1 Deb package no longer exists

This has been removed as a dependency on 29th May 2022, as it is not specifically required by EPrints.

MySQL root user cannot be used

This is now explained under EPrints' Getting Started instructions. As it is typical for most modern Linux operating systems.

libncurses6 Deb package not available

In more recent versions of Ubuntu libncurses6 is the name for the ncurses package but as Ubuntu 22.04 is older you will need to install libncurses5 instead.

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

N.B. It is assumed that you are installing the latest version of 3.4. Earlier versions may have issues not listed here.

Previous Issues

MySQL root user cannot be used

This is now explained under EPrints' Getting Started instructions. As it is typical for most modern Linux operating systems.

libncurses5 APT package dependency no longer exists

Install libncurses6 instead. However, as both Ubuntu 24.04 and Ubuntu 26.04 only have libncurses6 the general instructions have been updated to use libncurses6, so this is no longer an issue.

Debian Known Issues

See Debian Known Issues