3 Last updated: $Date: 2003/09/03 18:29:00 $
4 ----------------------------------------------------------------
6 Here is a short installation-howto of Mir.
11 - tomcat 4.0.4+ or 3.3 (4.0.3 and below have some bad bugs)
12 tomcat is available from http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/
13 - apache 1.3.x. with mod_jk.so. As far as I can tell the connector for 2.x is
14 still rather undocumented. http://httpd.apache.org
16 - ant (a java-based make)
17 - jaxp-1.1 (a SAX 2.0 compliant XML parser, comes with ant >= 1.4)
18 - the JAI image framework (Java Advanced Imaging) versin 1.1.1 . get it from
19 java.sun.com. ** NOTE: because JAI uses a native acceration library (a .so)
20 it must be placed in tomcat's "lib" (i.e $TOMCAT_HOME/common/lib) directory and
21 not under the default webapps/Mir/WEB-INF/lib directory **
22 - A good reading of Tomcat, Apache and Postgresql documentation if you are not
23 familiar with any of them. The documentation is available at:
24 http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/tomcat-4.0-doc/index.html,
25 http://httpd.apache.org/docs/ and http://www.postgresql.org respectively.
31 cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@mir.indymedia.org:/var/lib/cvs login
36 cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@mir.indymedia.org:/var/lib/cvs co -r MIR_1_1 mir
39 2. customize the config:
42 cp config.properties-dist config.properties
44 now customize config.properties for your needs.
47 3. configure the perms.sh file if neccessary -- IMPORTANT! READ THIS!
48 We provide a script that sets all files' and direcories' permissions to
49 a quite reasonable state. This script gets automagically called by
50 ant after compilationl. The most important thing you have to do after
51 compiling Mir is to ensure that the log files -- especially
52 dbentity.log -- are not readable by users that could compromise
53 system security, because all passwords and the like will be logged here.
55 cp perms.sh-dist perms.sh
57 Now, change the install directory and group in perms.sh
61 4. There is NO step 4!!
63 5. compile. For this step, you have to make sure that the TOMCAT_HOME
64 environment variable is set to the root of your tomcat installation.
65 The build.xml compile target will give up if this is not set.
67 Do this as root so the permissions script is able to set
68 the permissions and owners correctly.
73 6. Link in the webapps directory of tomcat to the install directory (the
74 directory is in mir/bin/mir (Here and in the rest of this document,
75 we assume you called the link "Mir", but this could be named anything.)
76 cd ${TOMCAT_HOME}/webapps
77 ln -s /path/to/mir/bin/mir Mir
79 with tomcat 4.0.x, you could dynamically reload and stop the Mir webapp without
80 restarting tomcat by using the "Manager App" with the following url:
82 http://localhost:8080/manager/stop?path=/Mir
84 This is practical if you are running several installations of mir on one
85 tomcat or other webapps and can't afford to shutdown all of them.
86 See the tomcat documentation to learn how to enable and use the manager app.
88 7. Copy any dynamic library files ending with ".so" (so far only the JAI native
89 acceleration library found in the JAI package tarball or zip from sun) to your
90 $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/i386 directory (where the other ".so" files live). Or, you
91 can skip the whole thing and live without "native" acceleration for image
94 8a. create a new database
95 The database name should be the same as in config.properties. Please look at
96 the section "Database.*" to look up the names or change them to your needs.
98 It is wise in terms of system seurity to use an unprivileged user for this
99 task instead of the superuser. This is because if Mir uses the superuser to
100 connect to the database and anybody manages to find out the password Mir
101 uses to connect, the attacker can take over the complete database. So, in
102 the following examples, we assume that the database name is "Mir", the
103 database user will be "joe" and the password is "joshua". Please note that
104 this particular password is far from being a good one. Watch "Wargames" for
108 To access the database as the database superuser, you either have to log in
109 as postgres on Unix level (which we don't recommend because you will need
110 another user to have a login shell and a password which makes system
111 penetration more likely) or you have to tell PostgreSQL with each
112 application call that you want to connect as a specific user. In the
113 following example we'll create the mir database as postgreSQL user
118 ./createmirdb.sh mir pete joe joshua
120 8b. Apply neccessary changes to config.properties
122 Please open config.properties and look for the lines that begin with
123 "Database.". The interesting properties are "Username", "Password", "Host"
124 and "Name". Change these properties so that they reflect the settings you
125 used to create the database and the user.
127 You should make sure that no copy of config.properties (neither in mir nor
128 in Mir/src nor in Mir/WEB-INF/classes nor in the directory tree you compiled
129 Mir from) is world-readable. Else you wouldn't have to install a password,
132 8c. Setup PostgreSQL so that all localhost connections have to pass a
135 In /etc/postgresql/pg_hba.conf, change the line with 127.0.0.1 as follows:
137 host all 127.0.0.1 255.0.0.0 password
139 This means: All connections from 127.0.0.1 to any database will have to
140 authenticate themselves with a password. Please refer to the PostgreSQL
141 documentation if you want a different authentication setup. Make sure
142 however that mir can connect to it's database using password authentication.
144 9. For now, there's no step 9 either.
146 10. Tweak mime-type extensions mappings in etc/web.xml file.
148 *** Note the defaults should be o.k for most installations ***
150 Add or remove any mime types you wish to support. This is used to figure
151 out the mime-type when (broken browsers?) browsers don't send the mime-type
152 in the content-type header field when uploading a media file. Note add the
153 moment you still have to add these to the media_type SQL table as well which
154 maps the mime-types to the correct mediaHandler class. See the comments in
155 the MirMedia class in javadoc for more details.
161 There are 2 ways to do this. auto-generation of mod_jk.conf or manula JKMount
162 lines. (rumour has it that Tomcat 4.0.x doesn't support auto-generation, but
163 this is unconfirmed).
165 In both examples please note that the JkWorkersFile line only needs to appear
166 once per Apache config.
168 Also this assumes that your tomcat installation has it's ajp13 conenctor
169 turned on. See tomcat's server.xml file and documentation for this. Chances
170 are that it is turned on.
172 Method a). The automatic mod_jk.conf method:
174 insert the following patch into /etc/apache/httpd.conf. Edit the directories
178 JkWorkersFile /path/to/tomcat/conf/workers.properties
179 Include /path/to/tomcat/conf/mod_jk.conf-auto
182 Do not put any JkMount lines into your httpd.conf!
184 If mod_jk.conf-auto doesn't get written or is 0 bytes in size, check your
185 system for file ownership/permissions problems.
187 Method b). Manual JKMount lines
189 insert the following patch into /etc/apache/httpd.conf. Edit the directories
193 JkWorkersFile /path/to/tomcat/conf/workers.properties
199 13. configure apache for the static site
201 * Make sure that if you are using a non standard character set enconding that
202 Apache doesn't accidentally send the wrong encoding in the HTTP headers.
204 * set the document root to the same directory as in the mir config file
205 * enable shtml includes:
206 - add LoadModule includes_module /usr/lib/apache/1.3/mod_include.so
207 - make sure your directory contains "Options Includes"
208 * Determine if you need to modify any apache mime-mappings
209 - The web-server host must recognize the .m3u, .pls and other file extensions
210 and send the proper "audio/x-mpegurl" and "audio/x-scpls" mime-types
211 respectively. If the web server is apache, it's easy, just
217 to the file pointed to by the "TypesConfig" command in your apache config
218 file. Or add and equivalent AddType command to your httpd.conf. Of course
219 this assumes that the mod_mime is loaded.
223 now the admin-application is accesable via:
225 http://host/Mir/servlet/Mir
227 and the openposting-servlet via
229 http://host/Mir/servlet/OpenMir
231 standard login is admin/indymedia. See the webdb_users SQL table to change/add
237 The Mir code offers no internal search facilities, rather, the design
238 expects the use of an external program to crawl and index the static
239 site. One (recommended) tool for doing this is htdig
240 (http://htdig.org), which generates static databases of the site
241 content and then accesses those databases through a very fast CGI
242 program written in C. In the scripts directory, a perl CGI script
243 which wraps calls to htsearch is provided (scripts/search.pl) which
244 will allow searching based off of media type. (This is possible
245 because the standard templates will include META keywords like
246 hasAudio, hasVideo, etc.)
250 see the UPGRADING.mir file.
254 You can give these a try if anything goes wrong:
256 + Restart Tomcat. Especially after compiling the sources Tomcat has to be
259 + Check file permissions and ownership. Try and run perms.sh.
261 ----------------------------------------------------------------
263 $Date: 2003/09/03 18:29:00 $ - the Mir coders