Frequently Asked Questions

This all needs sorting out, it's just being grabbed from the old wiki for now.

• Copyright and License FAQ
• Metadata FAQ
• Searching FAQ
• OAI FAQ
• BOAI Self-Archiving FAQ
• How much will it cost?

What operating systems can we use?

EPrints should work on any UNIX-like operating system. We use Ubuntu (Debian) and Redhat Enterprise Linux.

Running EPrints on Microsoft Windows is possible but not recommended - it can be difficult to get all the necessary dependencies in place.

What computer do we need?

Any new PC is easily powerful enough. Suggested minimum spec. for a live service: 1gig RAM, 20gig Harddrive, 1GHz+ processor.

How much will it cost to set up?

Most of the costs are staff time. Equipment costs are a PC, an internet connection and a BACKUP STRATEGY. Please remember to budget for backups.

EPrints, and all the other software required to make it work, are available for no cost. At some point in the future EPrints may offer some pay-services, but the core software will remain zero cost and freely available to all.

See How much will it cost?

How much diskspace will we need?

Proabably about 2 megabytes per eprint. At the time of writing a 120GB drive costs 50 pounds. That drive would hold approximately 60000 eprints.

See also: Detailed disk usage statistics.

Is it possible when depositing a document, to just point to an "alternative location" rather than have the full text copied and held in the eprint archive?

Yes, and to suppress the normal warning about no documents attached look in [archive_root]/cfg/cfg.d/eprint_warnings.pl.

I need to run apache as a user other than "eprints", what do I do to make EPrints work in this situation?

Example, apache is running as user "apache".

• Make all the eprints files owned by "apache" instead of "eprints"
• Edit SystemSettings?.pm to tell eprints to run as user "apache"
• You'll need to run all command line scripts as user "apache"
• All eprints cron jobs should be owned by user "apache"

If you are installing a new copy of eprints, you can specify the user and group to use when you run 'configure'. Do

./configure --help 

for details.

How do I get the body HTML of a page without the template around it?

This is handy for dymnamically linking eprints content into other sites.

For "view" pages you need to add the option include=>1 to the view configuration. This will cause generate_views to make a .include page in addition to the .html page. The .include page will have no template around it.

For dynamic pages, those under /perl/, you can add the cgi parameter mainonly=yes

eg. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/perl/latest?mainonly=yes

How do I get statistics on number of deposits per month?

This rather grim bit of SQL should work, although datestamp is the last modified date, not the submission OR creation date, it should still give a good indication.

select count(*), year(datestamp), month(datestamp)
from archive
group by year(datestamp),month(datestamp)
order by year(datestamp),month(datestamp);

I've edited the template (or other config file) but nothing seems to have changed - why?

While EPrints tries to automatically reload when a configuration file is changed you may need to reload the Web server for changes to take effect. See also the reload command in API:bin/epadmin.

Installation Related Questions

What platforms will GNU EPrints run on?

In theory any UNIX like platform: Linux, Solaris, BSD etc. even OSX! If you don't care then we recommend the RedHat Linux distribution.

When running a script I get the error; "Insecure dependency in mkdir while running with -T switch"

This usually indicates you are running an eprints script as root. Don't do that; become user 'eprints' instead.

title and fulltext search returns no results, but date search does

The indexer daemon is probably not running or is not working correctly, see API:bin/indexer.

I don't want to give configure_archive my mysql root password. What is the alternative?

(instructions acurate as of EP 2.3.12)

Run configure_archive but say "no" to "create the database?"

Log into the mysql client as root:

% mysql -u root -p
Enter password: 

(and enter your password)

This example creates a database for archive "foo" with user "foouser" and password "foopass".

These values should match the values you gave to configure_archive. You can check them in /opt/eprints2/archives/foo.xml

mysql> CREATE DATABASE foo;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.06 sec)

mysql> GRANT ALL ON foo.* TO foouser@localhost;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.52 sec)

The last bit depends if you are running on a MySQL?

version >= 4.1

mysql> SET PASSWORD FOR foouser@localhost = OLD_PASSWORD("foopass");

version < 4.1

mysql> SET PASSWORD FOR foouser@localhost = PASSWORD("foopass");

That's all configure_archive would have done.

---

How do I get a value for a field of an eprint (without using any SQL)?

(assuming the eprint is in the main archive, and has eprintid number 23)

 my $ds = $session->get_archive()->get_dataset( "archive" );
 my $eprint = EPrints::EPrint?->new( $session, 23, $ds );
 my $value = $eprint->get_value( 'editors' );

How can I get a utf8 string of the name of a subject, given its subjectid?

  sub get_subject_name_string
  {
	my( $session, $subjectid ) = @_;
	my $subj = EPrints::Subject->new( $session, $subjectid ); 
	if( !defined $subj ) 
	{
		return "errer, unknown subject: $subjectid";
	}
	return EPrints::Utils::tree_to_utf8( $subj->render_description() );
  }

...

Using mod_perl2, pages with redirects (e.g. /perl/search) are blank. How do I fix this?

In perl_lib/EPrints/Session.pm change

      $self->{"request"}->status_line( "302 Moved" );

to

      $self->{"request"}->status(302);