INSTALL - Slash Installation
This document describes how to install Slash 2.2. For instructions on installation or upgrade of previous versions of Slash, see the INSTALL document included with those distributions.
These instructions have only been tested on Linux. Installation under BSD and other Unix OSes should work similarly, but there are problems with the Makefile and installtion under some non-Linux OSes. Feel free to submit bug reports (better, patches) for any such problems. We've had reports of the 1.0.x version of Slash running on Windows, but have done no testing and have no further information, and have no information about Slash 2 running on Windows.
PostgreSQL support in Slash 2 is currently alpha-quality.
Slash can always be downloaded from SourceForge.net, from the FTP site, and via CVS.
http://sf.net/projects/slashcode/
ftp://ftp.slashcode.com//pub/slashcode/
http://cvs.slashcode.com/
See the SourceForge.net page for patches and bug reports.
The software and hardware requirements are listed at the end of the document, because we know you want to get right into the installation. Please read those requirements if you have any question about what might be required.
Upgrading information is also toward the end of the document.
There are six steps to installation. Skip the parts you already have installed (making sure you have the correct versions). Make sure to read the special note about Apache / mod_perl installation.
Please refer to MySQL documentation for compilation and/or installation notes for any questions with this process. Find the script that runs mysql (probably safe_mysqld) and add these lines to the beginning of it:
TZ=GMT
export TZ
Start MySQL (it must be running for the installation of Perl modules and Slash).
Create a database to be used by Slash.
Create a username/password that can access that database (by default, we normally set the user to have all permissions, but that might not be appropriate for your site; make sure that you have at least privileges to select, insert, update, delete, create, drop, and index).
perl is likely already installed on your machine; make sure its version is at least the minimum required (see REQUIREMENTS).
You MUST install mod_perl and Apache as directed here. OK, that is not strictly true, but it is mostly true. If you already have mod_perl installed, it is probably not configured properly to work with Slash and you will have to rebuild it. [If you are using the provided httpd.conf file from the slash distribution, and find that Apache is giving you errors, chances are mod_perl is not installed correctly, and you need to build it from scratch.] Of course, if you have your own Apache modules or build options, you will need to modify the instructions here appropriately.
First, untar apache and mod_perl. Then, go to the mod_perl directory, and have mod_perl build and install apache for you:
perl Makefile.PL APACHE_SRC=/where_you_have_the_source DO_HTTPD=1 \
USE_APACI=1 PERL_MARK_WHERE=1 EVERYTHING=1 \
APACHE_PREFIX=/where_apache_will_be_installed
make
make test
make install
NOTE: You may be unsuccessful with make test if the perl modules
are not yet installed. However, some Perl modules will not install
without Apache and mod_perl installed. If you wish, come back and
run make test after installing here, and then installing the Perl
modules, to make sure everything is OK.
The best way to do this is with the CPAN module.
You might also wish to install each module by hand, using distributions found on the CPAN. See perlmodinstall for more information on installing perl modules.
IMPORTANT NOTES:
cpan> o conf make_install_arg UNINST=1
install Net::Cmd first, before you install anything else.
If it fails only tests 8 and 9 of t/require, then it is OK;
just do force install Net::Cmd, then continue on with the
rest of the modules installation.
To use the CPAN module, invoke the CPAN shell:
perl -MCPAN -e shell
After it has been configured, install Bundle::Slash:
cpan> install Bundle::Slash
To read the README for any module, before or after installing:
cpan> readme MODULE
If you have problems, feel free to re-run install Bundle::Slash. It
will safely skip anything already installed.
To read the documentation of any of the modules, once they have been
installed, type perldoc MODULE at the command line.
Unpack the distribution and go to the new directory that creates, and type:
make
make install
Note: you will want the GNU versions of fileutils (version 4.0 recommended, for cp and install) and make. Older versions of install, and make and cp from other systems, might not work.
There are a few options to make and make install you may
want to change.
option default purpose
==========================================================
SLASH_PREFIX /usr/local/slash Location for
installed files
INIT /etc or /etc/rc.d Location for init
scripts
USER nobody User to own files
GROUP nobody Group to own files
CP cp Name of or path to
alternate `cp`
INSTALL install Name of or path to
alternate `install`
(USER and GROUP will also be changed later on a per-site basis, in step 6. while running install-slashsite.)
So, for example, you might type (although the default SLASH_PREFIX is strongly recommended):
make SLASH_PREFIX=/home/slash
make install SLASH_PREFIX=/home/slash
When done, a configuration file for Apache will be created at
$SLASH_PREFIX/slash.conf. You can put its contents into your
httpd.conf, or you can just Include it in your httpd.conf.
WARNING!
Please be aware that if you include $SLASH_PREFIX/slash.conf or $SLASH_PREFIX/sites/sitename/sitename.conf more than once, or if this file shares contents with directives in httpd.conf, that your Slash site WILL break. The directives in $SLASH_PREFIX/slash.conf should be run only ONCE in any any site context. Read through $SLASH_PREFIX/slash.conf to make sure it all looks proper.
Go to your installation directory (by default, /usr/local/slash)
and execute (where VIRTUAL_USER is the name of the virtual
user given in the DBIx::Password distribution):
bin/install-slashsite -u VIRTUAL_USER
The program will prompt for answers to several configuration questions.
Answer the questions. When done, another configuration
file will be created at $SLASH_PREFIX/$SITENAME/$SITENAME.conf.
You can put its contents unto your httpd.conf, or you can just Include
it in your httpd.conf.
NOTE: Read the message printed at the end of running install_slashsite.
After installation of the site is done, and Apache has been stopped and started (do NOT try to restart Apache, but do a full stop and start), run slashd. This should be done via the init script:
/etc/init.d/slash start
slashd is the daemon that runs routine maintenance on Slash sites, including sending out daily mailings, cleaning up the database, and updating stories. The init script above will start up an individual slashd daemon process process for each installed site.
You can, of course, have a separate database server from your Slash server. Further, you can have multiple web servers for one Slash site. Slashdot, for instance, has one primary server with all of the code (Apache, perl, etc.), and it runs slashd and NFS. Each web server then mounts the code read-only over NFS. Some notes:
Slash has support for virtual hosts, so you can have multiple Slash sites on one machine. Simply execute step 6 in the install process for each Slash site (after adding a new virtual user to DBIx::Password for each).
In Slash, there are two variables for the root URL of the site. absolutedir is the full URL, including protocol, while rootdir is the URL without protocol:
absolutedir http://slashcode.com
rootdir //slashcode.com
absolutedir is used only for creating external links to the site (such as in RSS files). rootdir is used for internal links; that way, you can use the same HTML pages for SSL and non-SSL. You don't have to do anything special to the code or preferences to allow it to work with SSL by itself, SSL and non-SSL together, or non-SSL by itself.
It is possible to install and run everything here without root.
Describing the process for a non-root install would take up significant space and time, having to account for differences in various systems, and all the workarounds necessary for it to work.
If you must have a non-root install, consult the various documentation for Apache, MySQL, and perl about running and installing without root access. Then, for Slash, you simply need to set the make variables PREFIX, SLASH_PREFIX, and INIT appropriately for your needs.
Note: Slash (or, more accurately, Apache + mod_perl and MySQL) take up a lot of system resources. It is not advisable for anyone to run Slash at all on a system, without the permission of the administrator of that system.
These upgrade procedures are still in testing. Please read them entirely before beginning. We are not responsible for any loss of data or functionality.
Slash 2.2 is a major upgrade from Slash 2.0. It takes a little bit of work to get it going.
--- Install.pm~ Wed May 9 15:02:34 2001
+++ Install.pm Fri Sep 28 12:44:41 2001
@@ -116,7 +116,7 @@
sub writeTemplateFile {
my($self, $filename, $template) = @_;
open(FILE, '>' . $filename) or die "$! unable to open file $filename to write to";
- for (keys %$template) {
+ for (qw(section description title page lang name template seclev)) {
next if ($_ eq 'tpid');
print FILE "__${_}__\n";
$template->{$_} =~ s/\015\012/\n/g;
template-check on your site, and make a note of every change
you've made to the standard templates. You will need to make those
changes again, manually, later.
This is unfortunately unavoidable, because templates include code that changes significantly between releases. It is recommended that you compile your changes into a THEME so they may easily be updated and applied.
If installing on a different machine ...
If installing on the same machine ...
The reason to not move anything is that you can keep any customizations done (images, additional scripts and plugins, static files, etc.). The reason to move it is so that everything is clean. It is highly recommended that you move it, and then manually copy back the pieces you want.
Read all of this section before doing any of it.
The first thing to do is to, as per the instructions below under INSTALLATION, unpack the latest distribution and run make and make install with the proper arguments.
If you did modify the original instead of a copy, then break the symlink, copy over the original (as modified), and then continue. The original will be copied over by the new version, and your modified copy will remain intact.
% mkdir templates
% cd templates
% template-tool -u VIRTUAL_USER -d
(Defaults to current directory.)
% template-check -u VIRTUAL_USER
(Defaults to current directory.)
This will use diff to show you the differences. You can either go into the templates with a text editor (in another window) and change the dumped ones by hand, edit them by hand in the Template Editor via the web browser, or take a note of every template you want to copy over your existing template.
After each directory of templates is done, hit "q" to continue to the next plugin/theme.
% template-tool -u VIRTUAL_USER -s LIST
Please read the complete documentation of utils/slash1toslash2.2. It is a program that will convert your database from Slash 1.0 to a new Slash 2.2 database. The program documentation (which can be read with perldoc) details exactly what process it follows to do the conversion, so you can attempt to do it by hand if you prefer.
Below, the main software components needed are listed. The recommended version is noted, along with the earliest version that has been tested (or is expected) to work. The earliest versions are not necessarily supported, but should work. perl 5.005_03 is supported, but MySQL 3.22 is not.
http://www.cpan.org/
http://www.mysql.com/
http://httpd.apache.org/
http://perl.apache.org/
The latest version of each module is recommended.
For Compress::Zlib, the zlib development library is required. For XML::Parser, the expat library is required. If they are not present on the system already, download and install them before installing the modules.
http://www.gzip.org/zlib/
http://sf.net/projects/expat/
The following required distributions are all included in the Bundle::Slash distribution.
There are no specific hardware requirements. Apache (with mod_perl) and MySQL both take up a lot of RAM; running a complete system with 128MB might be possible, if you do some tuning of the configuration, but a practical minimum 256MB is recommended, though less could be sufficient with some tuning.Storage space depends on how busy you expect the site to be; 250MB is possible, but a minimum 1GB is recommended. Necessary processor speed is also dependent on how busy the site is; Pentium 133 or equivalent might work, but less than a Pentium II/200 is not recommended.
For the curious, Slashdot (as of September 2001) runs on nine machines: nine webservers (each is Pentium III/600, 1GB RAM, 9GB hard drive), one NFS server (600MHz PIII, 1GB RAM), and three database servers database server (quad 600MHz PIII, 4GB RAM). One database server is live, one is a replicated backup, and a third is for doing live searches and performance-intensive SELECTs by daemons etc.
However, this is certainly overkill for most sites (and possibly even overkill for Slashdot). slashcode.com runs on two web servers and one NFS/database server. Many sites can run fine on just one machine for everything (we use a minimum of two web server machines on every site for load balancing and redundancy).
Each version of slash has a code name, and the files on CVS for that version are tagged with that name. The current release is always MAIN. The versioning scheme is as Linux and Perl are, revision.version.subversion. version is even for releases, and odd for development. The codename applies to the development version and subsequent release.
For example, 1.0.11 is a normal release, while 1.1.0 is the first development release for what will be the next release (either 1.2 or 2.0).
The CVS repository is tagged with version numbers, so to get release 1.0.3, use tag "v1_0_3_0". The last number (in this case a zero) will be incremented during development ("v1_0_3_1", "v1_0_3_2", etc.) until the next release.
$Id: INSTALL.html,v 1.26 2001/11/07 16:54:41 pudge Exp $