Installing EPrints on Debian/Ubuntu

Requirements

• Ubuntu 14.04 LTS or 16.04 LTS (non-LTS versions not recommended) or Debian 7 (Wheezy) or 8 (Jessie).

Installing from EPrints 3.3.x DEB

For Ubuntu 14.04 and Debian 7.0

As the root user create a file at /etc/apt/sources.list.d/eprints.list and add the following line

deb http://deb.eprints.org/ stable/

Now to install EPrints and all its dependencies execute the following command, again as the root user:

apt-get update
apt-get install eprints

At present the latest Deb for EPrints (3.3.15) is not signed, therefore you will not to accept that it is unauthenticated. The next Deb package release of EPrints (3.3.16) should be signed.

EPrints will now be installed at /usr/share/eprints3. However, you will not yet have a running archive. Follow the Getting Started with EPrints 3 instructions to set this up.

For Ubuntu 16.04 and Debian 8

The current Debian package (Deb) for EPrints 3.3.15 will not install on Ubuntu 16.04 and Debian 8 due to unmet dependencies, as certain other Deb packages have been removed between versions. The Deb for the next version of EPrints (3.3.16) will have amended dependencies, so the same method for Ubuntu 14.04 and Debian 7.0 can be used.

Instead of setting up the deb.eprints.org package repository download this modified version of the 3.3.15 Deb package and run the following command as root from the same directory as you downloaded it:

apt-get install ./eprints_3.3.15_all-xenial.deb

EPrints will now be installed at /usr/share/eprints3. However, you will not yet have a running archive. Follow the Getting Started with EPrints 3 instructions to set this up.

Installing EPrints 3.3.x from Source

N.B. Installing from source is generally discouraged particularly for production repositories. However, if want to develop the EPrints code or a plugin or Bazaar package it may be useful to install from source, ideally from EPrints Core Git repository.

First, as theroot users install all the dependencies for EPrints:

apt-get install perl libncurses5 libselinux1 libsepol1 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 lynx wget ghostscript xpdf antiword elinks pdftk texlive-base texlive-base-bin \
  psutils imagemagick adduser tar gzip mysql-server mysql-client unzip libsearch-xapian-perl

Next, create the eprints user

useradd eprints

Next, clone the Git repository from GitHub to /opt/ and set the eprints user as the owner. It is probably best to checkout the latest release rather than using HEAD, which may have known issues:

apt-get install git
git clone https://github.com/eprints/eprints.git /opt/eprints3
cd /opt/eprints3/
git checkout tags/v3.3.15
chown -R eprints:eprints . 

Next, as the eprints user copy /opt/eprints3/perl_lib/EPrints/SystemSettings.pm.tmpl to /opt/eprints3/perl_lib/EPrints/SystemSettings.pm

EPrints is now fully installed at /opt/eprints3. However, you will not yet have a running archive. Follow the Getting Started with EPrints 3 instructions to set this up.

Now, update Apache configuration to set it up to use the eprints user and group, by ensuring the following lines are set thus in /etc/apache2/envvars:

export APACHE_RUN_USER=eprints
export APACHE_RUN_GROUP=eprints

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

Include /opt/eprints3/cfg/apache.conf

To enable this as root run the command:

a2ensite eprints

Finally, restart Apache:

apachectl 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.

Troubleshooting

Issues with Ubuntu 14.04 (Apache 2.3/2.4)

Apache 2.3+ and PERL v5.16+ introduce a few changes which break EPrints.

A complete HOW-TO guide to install EPrints3 on Ubuntu 14.04 is available here

Current patches on github are:

• See last comment on https://github.com/eprints/eprints/issues/214 [ use of remote_ip ]
• https://github.com/eprints/eprints/issues/237 [ NameVirtualHost deprecated ]
• https://github.com/eprints/eprints/issues/236 [ Order allow,deny deprecated ]
• https://github.com/eprints/eprints/commit/157db0d27d423d38f9c0fc31ce47e519cd861d45 [ utf8::decode and URI parameters ]

Ensure that mpm_prefork module is enabled in /etc/apache2/mods-enabled (among others).

Complete list of modules for a working repository include the following (although some may be surplus to requirements e.g. php5 is not strictly necessary)

• access_compat.load
• alias.conf
• alias.load
• auth_basic.load
• authn_core.load
• authn_file.load
• authz_core.load
• authz_host.load
• authz_user.load
• autoindex.conf
• autoindex.load
• deflate.conf
• deflate.load
• dir.conf
• dir.load
• env.load
• filter.load
• mime.conf
• mime.load
• mpm_prefork.conf
• mpm_prefork.load
• negotiation.conf
• negotiation.load
• perl.load
• php5.conf
• php5.load
• setenvif.conf
• setenvif.load
• status.conf
• status.load

Installing LibXSLT.so from CPAN

There are some issues with the LibXSLT.so that is installed by the Deb package libxml-libxslt-perl, which causes the Apache webserver to generate a segmentation fault. libxml-libxslt-perl will be removed as a dependency from the next eprints Deb package (3.3.16) but is you want to integrate EPrints with third party applications (e.g. Symplectic Elements) then you will need this installed. A version that does not suffer this segmentation fault can be installed using CPAN.

Instructions to be written