WebGUI Content Manager
From OptionC
| Table of contents |
Introduction
The purpose of this document is to document the approach for installing Plain Black's (http://www.plainblack.com/spreadwebgui) WebGUI, an open source web content management system. WebGUI does not (currently) have a Debian package, so it's a little more complicated than other installations on this wiki. There is nothing in this document that makes it Xen-specific, so it can be used directly on a physical machine.
Conventions
Throughout this document we have used "webguitest" as the name of the domain.
Base Installation
Start with a base system, such as the one detailed here. You will need to have a larger amount of diskspace -- a minimum of 512MB with 1GB being the optimal minimum.
On this system, we need to have both Apache 2 and MySQL installed:
apt-get update apt-get install apache2 mysql-server
Installation of WebGUI
We now need to begin the actual installation of WebGUI. First we must install the remaining packages on which WebGUI depends. Most of these are standard Debian packages.
apt-get install make perlmagick libapache2-mod-perl2 \
libwww-perl libdbi-perl libdbd-mysql-perl \
libarchive-tar-perl libcompress-zlib-perl \
libio-zlib-perl libhtml-parser-perl \
libsoap-lite-perl libcache-cache-perl \
libdate-manip-perl liblog-log4perl-perl \
libtie-ixhash-perl libhtml-template-perl \
libxml-simple-perl libnet-ldap-perl
One or two required packages are not available from Debian. These are Perl libraries for which we will use CPAN.
perl -MCPAN -e shell
If this is the first time using CPAN you'll need to go through the configuration. Most of the defaults are safe, though you will need to choose the appropriate continent, country, and ftp sites to actually download the packages. Once CPAN is running, enter the following:
cpan> install Tie::CPHash cpan> install Parse::PlainConfig cpan> install HTML::TagFilter
Download the WebGUI source. I used webgui-6.6.4-gamma.tar.gz.
Untar it and move the resulting directory to a place that will be accessible by the web server:
tar -zxvf webgui-6.6.4-gamma.tar.gz mkdir /data mv WebGUI /data
Apache Configuration
Our installation was based upon a single site being run on the machine. As such, the modifications to the configuration files were made to the /etc/apache2/sites-available/default file. If the machine is hosting multiple domains then each of the files will need to be modified appropriately.
In the /etc/apache2/sites-available/default file, find the <Directory /var/www/> section. The "Options" line should look like:
Options ExecCGI Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
After the <Directory> section make the following additions:
<Files ~ "index\.pl$">
SetHandler perl-script
PerlHandler ModPerl::Registry
</Files>
PerlRequire /data/WebGUI/sbin/preload.perl
Alias /extras /data/WebGUI/www/extras
Finally, find the DocumentRoot line in the file. Make the following changes/additions:
DocumentRoot /var/www/domains/webguitest/www/public ServerName webguitest ServerAlias webguitest ErrorDocument 404 /index.pl/page_not_found CustomLog /var/www/domains/webguitest/www/logs/access_log combined
The differences are highlighted below:
NameVirtualHost *
<VirtualHost *>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
DocumentRoot /var/www/domains/webguitest/www/public
ServerName webguitest
ServerAlias webguitest
ErrorDocument 404 /index.pl/page_not_found
CustomLog /var/www/domains/webguitest/www/logs/access_log combined
<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
</Directory>
<Directory /var/www/>
Options ExecCGI Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all
# This directive allows us to have apache2's default start page
# in /apache2-default/, but still have / go to the right place
# RedirectMatch ^/$ /apache2-default/
</Directory>
<Files ~ "index\.pl$">
SetHandler perl-script
PerlHandler ModPerl::Registry
</Files>
PerlRequire /data/WebGUI/sbin/preload.perl
Alias /extras /data/WebGUI/www/extras
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
<Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin">
AllowOverride None
Options ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log
# Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
# alert, emerg.
LogLevel warn
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined
ServerSignature On
Alias /doc/ "/usr/share/doc/"
<Directory "/usr/share/doc/">
Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
Directory Configuration
Now we make the directories and so forth. First we link the directory into our more usual scheme of having Apache directories in /var/www:
ln -s /data/domains /var/www/domains
Next we make directories that are based on the Domain Name -- webguitest.
mkdir -p /data/domains/webguitest/www/public cd /data/domains/webguitest/www mkdir logs cp /data/WebGUI/etc/WebGUI.conf.original /data/WebGUI/etc/webguitest.conf cd public cp /data/WebGUI/www/index.pl ./ cp -R /data/WebGUI/www/uploads ./ chown nobody uploads
Next we create the log file:
touch /data/webgui.log chown nobody /data/webgui.log
Finally we set up a cron job to run the maintenance functions:
crontab -e
Inside the cron file:
0 * * * * cd /data/WebGUI/sbin/; perl runHourly.pl > /dev/null 2>&1
Database Setup
In order to setup the database, the following steps should be taken:
cd /data/WebGUI/etc mysql -p mysql> create database webguitest mysql> grant all privileges on webguitest.* to webgui@localhost identified by 'password' mysql> flush privileges mysql> exit mysql -uwebgui -ppassword webguitest < /data/WebGUI/docs/create.sql
WebGUI Configuration
Now we edit the /data/WebGUI/etc/webguitest.conf to match the database settings. The following values should be set:
sitename = webguitest dsn = DBI:mysql:webguitest dbuser = webgui dbpass = password logfile = /data/webgui.log extrasURL = /extras uploadsURL = /uploads uploadsPath = /data/domains/webguitest/www/public/uploads
We then modify the WebGUI gateway to use the new configuration file.
vi /data/domains/webguitest/www/public/index.pl
Find the line that looks like the following:
$configFile = "www.example.com.conf";
Change it to the name of our configuration file:
$configFile = "webguitest.conf";
And finally we restart Apache:
apachectl -k restart
Check to see that Apache is running by looking for processes running /usr/sbin/apache2. If it's not, refer to the log files in the /var/log/apache2 directory and see what's gone wrong.
Final Configuration
If you've got this far then it's time to run WebGUI. Point your browser to the machine/domain on which you have installed WebGUI. You should see a page which shows the Username and Password prefilled. This will get you into the website ready for your configuration.
Note: You should change the Admin password as soon as you log in.
The setup of an actual site running WebGUI is beyond the scope of this document. Play and have fun.
