Preface

This document is part of the LiveSupport project, Copyright © 2004 Media Development Loan Fund, under the GNU GPL.

Scope

This document describes how to compile and install LiveSupport on your system.

Introduction

LiveSupport has an installation procedure to make sure LiveSupport will work properly on your system. This procedure consists of the following steps:

For the impatient

Those who think they know everything, the quick steps to install LiveSupport are (make sure to run at least the ./bin/install.sh script as root):

wget http://livesupport.campware.org/look/campware/download/livesupport-<version>.tar.bz2
wget http://livesupport.campware.org/look/campware/download/livesupport-libraries-<version>.tar.bz2
tar xfj livesupport-<version>.tar.bz2
tar xfj livesupport-libraries-<version>.tar.bz2
cd livesupport-<version>
./configure
make setup && make compile
./bin/install.sh -d /usr/local/livesupport -g apache -r /var/www
/usr/local/livesupport/bin/scheduler.sh start

Then try the URL http://localhost/livesupport/htmlUI/var/html/ , and log in using username: root, password: q.

Everyone else, please read the lines below carefully.

Installing required compilation tools

This steps makes sure that all the required compilation tools and libraries are installed.  Please refer to your systems package management or the appropriate tools documentation for installation instructions for the tools and libraries listed below.

Tools

The following tools are expected on the system.

Libraries

The following development libraries are expected on the system. Please note that for all the libraries below, the development packages are expected to be installed as well.

Installing and configuring required external services

LiveSupport depends on some external services to be able to run, most importantly a PHP-capable web server (we assume apache), and a database server (we assume PostgreSQL).

Database

LiveSupport expects a PostgreSQL database, version 7.4 or later, to be installed on your system. The database will be accessed through TCP/IP, usually via the localhost interface. To achieve this, make sure to make the following changes to the PostgreSQL configuration files.

Edit postgresql.conf (usually /var/lib/postgres/data/postgresql.conf), to have to following line:

tcpip_socket = true

and also edit pg_hba.conf (usually /var/lib/postgres/data/pg_hba.conf) to include the following line, before any other lines related to access through localhost:

host    all         all         127.0.0.1         255.255.255.255   password

These changes will make sure that the PostgreSQL database is accessible via TCP/IP from localhost.

Web server

LiveSupport expects an apache web server with PHP and some additional PHP modules installed. In particular: Please note the user group your apache daemon is running as (usually apache or www-data), you will need this information later. Later on in this document, this group will be referred to as <apache-group>. Also note the document root directory for your apache installation (usually /var/www or /var/www/htdocs or /var/www/<yourhost>/htdocs). Later on in this document, this directory will be reffered to as <www-root>.

Obtaining LiveSupport sources

LiveSupport sources come in two different tarballs:
These files are accessible through the following URLs:
After downloading the files, untar them in the same directory:

tar xfj livesupport-<version>.tar.bz2
tar xfj livesupport-libraries-<version>.tar.bz2

which will create a livesupport-<version> directory, with all the required files to compile and install LiveSupport.

Compiling LiveSupport

To compile LiveSupport, enter the LiveSupport directory, and execute the following commands:

cd livesupport-<version>
./configure
make setup && make compile

This will take quite a while, so go have a tea, watch a movie, relax, etc.

Installing LiveSupport

After a successful compilation, to install LiveSupport, you have to decide which directory you want LiveSupport installed into. This directory will be referred to as <ls-installdir> later on in this document.

The installation is done using the bin/install.sh script found in the LiveSupport base directory. This script has to be run as root. To see the possible options to the script, invoke it with the --help parameter. A brief overview of the most frequently used parameters:

  -d, --directory     The installation directory, required.

The installation directory, a required parameter. Supply the previously decided LiveSupport installation directory here, <ls-installdir> (as mentioned above). A sensible value to use here is /usr/local/livesupport.

  -g, --apache-group  The group the apache daemon runs as.
                      [default: apache]

The user group the apache web server daemon runs at (see the section above on installing apache). Supply the <apache-group> value here, as mentioned above, which is usually either apache or www-data.

  -r, --www-root      The root directory for web documents served
                      by apache [default: /var/www]

The document root of your apache installation (see the section above on installing apache). Supply the <www-root> value here, as mentioned above, which is usually /var/www or /var/www/htdocs or /var/www/<yourhost>/htdocs. 

  -H, --host          The fully qualified host name of the system
                      [default: guess].

The fully qualified domain name of your system. If the install script cannot determine your host name correctly, please supply the FQDN via this parameter.

Thus a typical invocation of the install script is the following:

./bin/install.sh -d <ls-installdir> -g <apache-group> -r <www-root>

The install script has more options, which enable you to customize your installation of LiveSupport. Note that the defaults are usually quite sensible values, which will create the following setup:

Try it out

After a successful installation, the LiveSupport scheduler has to be started. The scheduler has a System V runlevel-style startup script, under <ls-installdir>/bin/scheduler.sh. To start the scheduler, simply invoke:

<ls-installdir>/bin/scheduler.sh start

The only thing left to do is to try out the LiveSupport web interface. For this purpose, point your browser to the following URL: http://<yourhost>/livesupport/htmlUI/var/html/ . For your first login, use the following values:
Have fun!