MMBase Mini-HOWTO: Installation on Debian Woody
Casper Joost Eyckelhof <joost@dnd.utwente.nl>
v0.2, 28 May 2002
This document briefly describes how to set up MMBase on a Debian
Gnu/Linux (Woody) system while using as much default packages as pos
sible.
______________________________________________________________________
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
1.1 Homepage
1.2 Disclaimer
1.3 History
1.4 Copyright
1.5 Acknowledgements
2. What is MMBase?
3. Prerequisites
3.1 Standard packages
3.2 Non standard package(s)
4. Getting MMBase and setting up some things
4.1 Getting MMBase
4.2 Getting mm.mysql
4.3 Creating a database for MMBase
4.4 Tomcat security manager
4.5 Copying xml-apis
5. Configuration files
5.1 apache
5.2 MMBase
6. Getting more help
______________________________________________________________________
1. Introduction
1.1. Homepage
If you got this document from a Linux HOWTO mirror site or a CD-ROM,
you might want to check back to the MMBase Mini-HOWTO home page
<http://www.dnd.utwente.nl/~joost/mmbase-mini/MMBase-Mini-HOWTO.html>
to see if there's a newer version around.
This document only covers a very small portion of MMBase installation,
for the official documentation visit MMBase home page
<http://www.mmbase.org>.
1.2. Disclaimer
No liability for the contents of this documents can be accepted. Use
the concepts, examples and other content at your own risk.
All copyrights are held by their respective owners, unless
specifically noted otherwise. Use of a term in this document should
not be regarded as affecting the validity of any trademark or service
mark.
Finally, this is my first HOWTO, my first experience with linuxdoc and
I am no expert on MMBase either. I am just trying to share my
solutions to some problems I encountered while installing MMBase on a
Debian system.
1.3. History
0.2 Updated for MMbase 1.5; lost support for apache frontend
0.1 Initial version - Installing MMBase 1.4 on Woody
1.4. Copyright
Copyright (c) 2001-2002 Casper Joost Eyckelhof, All rights reserved.
This is free documentware; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of version 2 or later of the GNU General Public
License <http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html>.
1.5. Acknowledgements
I would like to thank a number of people for helping me during my
quest for a clean installation. Although I do not know their names,
their nicknames on irc are: keesj, jdg, flax, scb2. I hope they
forgive me for not trying to find out their real names.
I would also like to thank my employer, the University of Twente for
allowing me to write this document during working hours.
2. What is MMBase?
On their website, the authors say the following about it:
· MMBase is an opensource publishing system. MMBase can be used to
create big websites that can be maintained easily.
· MMBase separates content from layout, in this way information can
be reused easily.
· MMBase is very unique in the way it maintains its information.
MMBase creates an object cloud that is a digital representation of
the 'real' world objects that are of interest for you.
In this document I will describe how to get MMBase running on a Debian
Woody System, using as many standard packages as possible. Though it
is very easy to run MMBase using their automatic installation tools,
you will end up with their version of a webserver, servlet engine and
database.
After a few days of playing with my own install, I think I can help
others by describing which choices I made to get things running. I do
not claim this is the only way, or the best way! But it worked for me
:)
The version of MMBase used is 1.5. Ofcourse everything might be
different with another version.
MMbase can run together with various webservers, databases, servlet
engines and JRE's. The programs/packages/versions I chose are:
· MySQL-Server (3.23.49-8)
· Tomcat4 (4.0.3-3)
· j2sdk1.3 (1.3.1-1) (Java)
· imagemagick (4:5.4.4.5-1)
Attention: The version numbers are those that were available in the
Woody distribution at the time of writing. Except for Java, which came
from a different location. See ``Non standard package(s)''.
Some other options for databases and webservers are described in the
installation notes for MMBase 1.5
3. Prerequisites
You will need a working Debian Woody installation, including apt, and
make sure the following packages are installed and working correctly.
3.1. Standard packages
· tomcat4
· mysql-server
· imagemagick
If these packages are not installed, you can do so by typing
apt-get install packagename
where packagename is one of the above.
Note: naturally you will need al dependencies too, but apt will take
care of that automatically.
3.2. Non standard package(s)
While writing this document, Woody only contains java 1.1, but for
MMBase version 1.2 or higher is needed. I installed the packages from
Blackdown. A list of Blackdown mirrors is at
http://www.blackdown.org/java-linux/mirrors.html
<http://www.blackdown.org/java-linux/mirrors.html>.
I added the following to my /etc/apt/sources.list , but the path might
be different for different mirrors:
deb ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/os/Linux/java/jdk/debian woody non-free
After that you can just type
apt-get install j2sdk1.3
Note: Although it must be possible to have more JRE's installed next
to eachother, I wouldn't recommend it if it's not absolutely
neccesary.
4. Getting MMBase and setting up some things
4.1. Getting MMBase
Now that you have all supporting packages up and running (you did
follow the instructions in the previous section, didn't you?) get
yourself a copy of MMBase. As said before, this document describes
the works for MMbase version 1.4.
Download MMBase from http://www.mmbase.org/releases/mmbase-1.5.zip
<http://www.mmbase.org/releases/mmbase-1.5.zip> with a browser, or
even easier:
wget http://www.mmbase.org/releases/mmbase-1.5.zip
From version 1.5 MMBase can be used as an webapp within Tomcat. So I
recommend unpacking the distribution in a temporary directory and
copying the mmbase-webapp/ tree to /var/lib/tomcat4/webapps/. If
MMBase is your only (or main) application on Tomcat, you can also
install it as ROOT, by copying everything from mmbase-webapp/ to
/var/lib/tomcat4/webapps/ROOT/.
In this document I will assume that MMBase is unpacked in
/var/lib/tomcat4/webapps/mmbase-webapp/
4.2. Getting mm.mysql
You will also need mysql.jar (JDBC driver for MySQL) which can be
downloaded from http://mmmysql.sourceforge.net/
<http://mmmysql.sourceforge.net/>.
Make sure you get the binary jar, which means you may have to unjar
the complete distribution first and locate the file
mm.mysql-2.0.14-bin.jar (2.0.14 was the latest release when writing
this HOWTO) Put the file in /var/lib/tomcat4/webapps/mmbase-
webapp/WEB-INF/lib/.
4.3. Creating a database for MMBase
MMbase needs a database and a user that has full rights on that
database. The user seems to needs rights via localhost and the real
hostname. This was not entirely clear to me.
Issue the following commands on the MySQL prompt. I chose a database
called MMBase, a user named mmbaseuser and the password secret.
CREATE DATABASE MMBase
USE MMBase
GRANT SELECT,INSERT,UPDATE,DELETE,CREATE,DROP ON MMBase.* TO mmbaseuser@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'secret';
GRANT SELECT,INSERT,UPDATE,DELETE,CREATE,DROP ON MMBase.* TO mmbaseuser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'secret'
GRANT SELECT,INSERT,UPDATE,DELETE,CREATE,DROP ON MMBase.* TO mmbaseuser@realhostname IDENTIFIED BY 'secret'
flush privileges;
4.4. Tomcat security manager
The Tomcat java security manager somehow interferes with MMBase. I
haven't found out what settings are needed to run MMBase with the
security manager active. Please let me know. For now I disabled the
security manager, which you should never not do. (Big Disclaimer!)
In /etc/default/tomcat4 change the security line to:
TOMCAT4_SECURITY="no"
4.5. Copying xml-apis
For some odd reason, Tomcat wants to find the file WEB-INF/lib/xml-
apis.jar also in /usr/share/tomcat/common/lib/xml-apis.jar, so you
have to copy it.
5. Configuration files
There are various configuration files that need some adjustment or
have to be created.
5.1. apache
In my setup, I created a virtual host to handle all MMBase request,
but using a few Alias directors it cannot be too hard to include
MMBase somewhere in your normal web tree.
That was for my last setup (HOWTO version 0.1 covering MMBase 1.4).
Using the newest version of Tomcat and Apache, I have troubles getting
the two working together. As soon as I find out how to use libapache-
mod-webapp or libapache-mod-jk with tomcat4, I will update this HOWTO.
One posible solution is compiling mod-webapp yourself, because the
version that comes with Debian seems to be non-standard. This is
beyond the scope and intention of this HOWTO.
This also means that by default MMBase will run on port 8180 (directly
from the stand-alone Tomcat server. You can change this port in
/etc/tomcat4/server.xml
5.2. MMBase
Although many things have to be configured on MMBase itself, I have
added a few subjects to this mini-HOWTO.
The database access should be set in WEB-INF/config/modules/jdbc.xml :
<property name="url">jdbc:mysql://$HOST:$PORT/$DBM?user=mmbaseuser&password=secret<//property>
<property name="user">url<//property>
<property name="password">url<//property>
<property name="database">MMBase<//property>
<property name="driver">org.gjt.mm.mysql.Driver<//property>
And one more line to change to get the mysql connection working. In
WEB-INF/config/modules/mmbaseroot.xml make sure you have this setting:
<property name="database">mysql<//property>
The builder for images contains a path to convert that is not Debian-
compliant. Change WEB-INF/config/builders/images.xml
<properties>
<property name="ImageConvert.ConverterCommand">bin/convert</property>
<property name="ImageConvert.ConverterRoot">/usr/</property>
<property name="ImageConvertClass">org.mmbase.module.builders.ConvertImageMagick</property>
</properties>
6. Getting more help
There are various sources for more help on most of the subject covered
in this mini-HOWTO. All packages have their own documentation. Some
links that really helped me are:
· Apache: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/
<http://httpd.apache.org/docs/>
· Tomcat: http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/tomcat-4.0-doc/index.html
<http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/tomcat-4.0-doc/index.html>
· MMBase: Click on Documentation on http://www.mmbase.org/
<http://www.mmbase.org/>
· Java: http://java.sun.com/ <http://java.sun.com/>
Another great source for help is channel #mmbase on ircnet, usually
there are some developers there.
