Installation

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

Installation

(If you are upgrading an existing installation of eprints please see the section on upgrading elsewhere in this manual.)

EPrints needs to be installed as the same user as the apache webserver runs as. We suggest you install it as user "eprints" and group "eprints". Under some UNIX platforms, creating a user and group can be done using the "adduser" command. Otherwise refer to your operating system documentation.

Unpack the eprints tar.gz file:

% gunzip eprints-3.something.tar.gz
% tar xf eprints-3.something.tar

Now run the "configure" script. This is a /bin/sh script which will attempt to locate various parts of your system such as the perl binary. It will also check your system for required components.

% cd eprints-3.something
% ./configure

By default the system installs as user and group "eprints". You will need to change this if you are not installing as either "root" or "eprints".

The configure script accepts a number of options. All are optional. The most important are:

--help 

List all the options (many are intended for compiled software and are ignored).

--prefix=PREFIX 

Where to install EPrints (or look for a version to upgrade). By default /opt/eprints3/

--with-perl=[PATH] 

Path of perl interpreter (in case configure can't find it, or you have more than one and want to use a specific one).

--with-user=[USER] 

Install eprints to run as USER. By default "eprints".

--with-group=[GROUP] 

Install eprints to run as GROUP. By default "eprints".

--with-virtualhost=[VIRTUALHOST] 

Use VIRTUALHOST rather than * for apache VirtualHost directives.

--disable-diskfree 

Disable disk free space calls. This will be automatically set if configure fails its tests for the df call.

--with-toolpath=[PATH] 

An alternate path to search for the required binaries.

Once you are happy with your configuration you may install eprints by running install.pl:

% ./install.pl

Now you should edit the configuration file for your copy of apache. This is often /usr/local/apache/conf/http.conf or /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Add this line: (If you didn't install eprints in /opt/eprints3/ replace that with the location on your system).

Include /opt/eprints3/cfg/apache.conf

Note that this file is only available after you created your archive via epadmin create. See Running epadmin for more information on creating an archive.

You may also wish to change the user and group apache runs as. The user must be the same as the user you installed eprints as. We recommend:

User eprints
Group eprints