Installing EPrints on Debian/Ubuntu

Requirements

• Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, 16.04 LTS or 18.04 LTS (non-LTS versions not recommended) or Debian 7 (Wheezy) or 8 (Jessie).

Installing from EPrints 3.3.x DEB

The latest version of EPrints 3.3 is 3.3.16. This version can be installed as follows

1. 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 ./

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

wget -O - http://deb.eprints.org/keyFile | apt-key add -
apt-get update
apt-get install eprints

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. Below are some caveats for particular version of Debian and Ubuntui

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

On Ubuntu 18.04 LTS rather than prompting you to set a password for MySQL server when installing this as a dependency, it just installs it without. However, this means on the root user can login to MySQL to add a database. As "epadmin create" runs at the eprints user, this will not be able to create a database for EPrints. The get round this as the root user connect to MySQL (just type "mysql" at the command line) and type the following two commands. You will want to set your own password (i.e. not 'changeme') , you may also want to restrict which databases the eprints user has control over. If you know the "Archive ID" you are going to use.

CREATE USER 'eprints'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED by 'changeme';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'eprints'@'localhost' WITH GRANT OPTION;

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 the root user 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 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