Required software

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

What Additional Software does EPrints Require?

In brief, EPrints requires Apache (with mod_perl), MySQL and Perl with some extra modules. Ideally you also want wget, tar and unzip.

EPrints bundles some perl modules which it uses, to save you installing them.

Where to get the Required Software

Almost all of the required software can be obtained through the yum (Fedora Core) or up2date (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) software management tools.

Fedora Core 5 also has a Package Manager tool under the Applications->Add/Remove Software menu.

Apache, MySQL, Perl and mod_perl can be installed during the installation of Fedora Core/RHEL (see Recommended Platforms).

Apache

FC% yum install httpd

(move to getting started) To make Apache start automatically when the machine is rebooted:

root% /sbin/chkconfig httpd on

PLEASE NOTE: EPrints 3.0+ only supports Apache version 2, not version 1.3!

MySQL

FC% yum install mysql mysql-server

(move to getting started) To make MySQL start automatically when the machine is rebooted:

root% /sbin/chkconfig mysqld on

Perl

FC% yum install perl

mod_perl

FC% yum install mod_perl

GDOME

FC% yum install gdome2 gdome2-devel

Additonal Perl Modules

The majority of perl modules need by EPrints are already installed on Fedora Core/RHEL.

Install Unicode::String:

% yum install perl-Unicode-String

Install XML::GDOME from source:

% wget http://cpan.uwinnipeg.ca/cpan/authors/id/T/TJ/TJMATHER/XML-GDOME-0.86.tar.gz
% tar xzvf XML-GDOME-0.86.tar.gz
% cd XML-GDOME-0.86/
% perl Makefile.PL
% make
% make install

Note: Fedora Core 5 needs 2 extra perl modules for XML::GDOME:

% yum install perl-XML-SAX perl-XML-LibXML-Common

Other Tools

File uploads

wget, tar, gunzip and unzip are required to allow users to upload files as .tar.gz or .zip or to captures them from a URL.

These all come installed with most modern versions of linux. If you can't get them working, you can remove the option by editing "archive_formats" in SystemSettings.pm

Tested with wget 1.6.

If there are problems you may need to tweak how these are invoked in SystemSettings.pm

Full Text Indexing

The EPrints indexer requires various tools to extract plain (UTF-8) text from different types of document for indexing.

The full text indexer requires various tools to index each kind of document. These tools may or may not be already installed in your system. EPrints uses these tools to build a "words" file for each document (which contains the text of the document in UTF-8). If it can't run the tool, the "words" file will be empty and EPrints will not retry creating it unless you manually remove it.

PDF

Requires pdftotext which is part of the xpdf package.

FC% yum install xpdf

Microsoft Word

Requires wvText which is part of the wvWare package.

FC% yum install wv

HTML

Requires the lynx tool (a text based browser)

FC% yum install lynx

LaTeX Tools

There is an optional feature which allows you to instruct EPrints to look in certain fields (e.g. title and abstract) for strings that look like LaTeX equations and render them as images. These tools are only required if you want to use this feature.

latex and dvips should already be available on Fedora Core and RHEL; if not:

FC% yum install tetex-latex

convert (part of the [ ImageMagick] package) should already be available on Fedora Core and RHEL; if not:

FC% yum install ImageMagick

This is a "cosmetic" feature, it only affects the rendering of information, so you can always add it later if you want to save time initially.

Other Platforms

The best place to get a software tool is the official site, but we've put a mirror of versions known to work at: http://www.eprints.org/files/tools/ - you don't need to install everything in the tools directory - just those described below.

• Installing MySQL
• Installing mod_perl
• Installing Perl modules
• Installing GDOME (optional but recommended)