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Content

Support Installation & Updates
  1. OpenProject
  2. Forums
  3. Support Installation & Updates
  4. Installation documentation

Installation documentation

Added by Željko Jagušt over 6 years ago

I apologize if someone already raised this issue, but your installation documentation is really poor. I'm sorry to say, but manual installation is the only proper way to go. Using a packaged installation (Ubuntu) and install wizard where you skip the setup of MySQL/Apache/Memcached/SMTP results in a completely unconfigured OpenProject with absolutely no pointers of how to continue in the official documentation. You cannot presume the user has an empty server and enforce the installation/configuration of MySQL/Apache2 etc. by starting installation wizard. Also uninstalling a package leaves unicorn and rake processes active, with all the files present in /opt/openproject folder with a dedicated user (openproject) still present.

At least remove this sentence from manual install guide on GitHub as it is misleading:
IMPORTANT: We strongly recommend to use the OpenProject installers (packaged installation). There is no real advantage installing OpenProject manually.


Replies (5)

RE: Installation documentation - Added by Cyril Rohr over 6 years ago

Hello,

Installing the package without running the wizards indeed ends up with an unconfigured OpenProject install since that's the whole point of the wizard. Basically if you only install the package, what you get is all the source code file with all the ruby and javascript dependencies already installed, so you then need to configure OpenProject by yourself as you would do in the manual installation (either through the configuration file or environment variables set with openproject config:set KEY1=value1).

Regarding the uninstall process, you are correct that we should try to scale down any processes started by the user before removing the package, I created an issue to track this. Regarding the user, it is left because you might have leftover attachments, repositories, or dumps from the installation, which we do not remove on purpose in case you need to retrieve them.

Finally, while it would be very nice to have a package that plays nice with all other components that might be already installed on any of the distributions we support, the sheer number of version combinations for e.g. MySQL/Apache, all their delicate variations across all OSes supported, and the specific requirements of OpenProject, make that we indeed strongly recommend to use the installers on a dedicated VM. Especially since you can run OpenProject on a 5$/month VM these days.

RE: Installation documentation - Added by Moutonjr NotApplicable over 5 years ago

Hi,

I acknowledge @Željko Jagušt for his remarks. I tried to script OpenProject installation, and can relate :

  • Installing from sources is messy: documentation is indeed broken somewhat with plenty of pitfalls;
  • Installing from package needs wizard, which need human interaction, what's not what I'm looking for.

It just need a documentation on how we can run openproject configure without interaction.. I tried to reverse-engineer the bash scripts but gosh the dev is a bash god and finding out how to proceed without comments is too complicated.

Does such documentation exist somewhere?

Thanks!

RE: Installation documentation - Added by Cyril Rohr over 5 years ago

Hello,

The options set by the wizard are all stored in /etc/openproject/installer.dat

So if you want to script the install without ever seeing the wizard, this is what you would do:

  • install the package for your distro (one-liner).
  • seed /etc/openproject/installer.dat with the configuration you'd like (easiest way is to run the wizard once manually in a VM or something, and then copy/adapt the resulting file for your scripted installs).
  • run openproject configure and relax while everything is taken care of.

It is true that some documentation would be useful for step 2, but doing a manual install once will show you all the values that you need.

For instance the installer.dat file might look like this:

postgres/autoinstall install
server/autoinstall install
server/hostname openproject.example.com
server/ssl yes
server/ssl_cert /ssl/server.crt
server/ssl_ca /ssl/server.crt
server/ssl_key /ssl/server.key
server/server_path_prefix /
smtp/autoinstall smtp
smtp/authentication login
smtp/admin_email you@example.com
smtp/password SMTP_PASSWORD
smtp/username SMTP_USERNAME
smtp/domain SMTP_DOMAIN
smtp/host SMTP_HOST
smtp/port 587
memcached/autoinstall install
repositories/svn-install install
repositories/git-install install
repositories/svn-path /var/db/openproject/svn
repositories/git-path /var/db/openproject/git
repositories/git-http-backend /usr/lib/git-core/git-http-backend/

RE: Installation documentation - Added by Moutonjr NotApplicable over 5 years ago

excellent piece of information, thank you very much!

RE: Installation documentation - Added by Corrado Topi over 3 years ago

Do you actually remove the installer.dat after installation? All information is in the open, unencrypted!

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