Koha on Caudium

The following assumes that

• you are installing Koha to the default location of /usr/local/koha, and
• your koha userid will be called “koha”.

The whole process of making Koha work on Caudium/Roxen can be described in 4 (very large) steps:

1. Create the koha user
2. Run installer.pl
3. Create a virtual server for the OPAC module
4. Create a virtual server for the INTRANET module

Steps 3 and 4 are mostly identical and will be described in detail below.

If you have control over your DNS zone files, it may be more convenient to create separate host names for the OPAC and the Intranet. In that case, you might want to use the “Virtual host matcher” module. (The “IP-less virtual hosting” module also works, and is much more intuitive to set up; but unfortunately it is deprecated.)

Just use the adduser command to create a user to run koha. On most GNU/Linux distributions, “adduser koha” will do.

• Before you run installer.pl, create a dummy httpd.conf. An empty one will do just fine.
• When the installer asks you for the location of httpd.conf, give it the path to the empty file you created in the previous step.
• When the installer asks you for the User setting, answer koha: This should be the same user that will run the Koha CGI scripts within the CGI Support module in your Koha virtual servers.
• Note that you can ignore any prompt asking you for host names, port numbers, and the web server email address. They only affect the Apache httpd.conf file, which is not used by Caudium/Roxen. However, if you are not sure which prompts can be ignored, you can answer all questions just to be on the safe side.

The steps for creating a virtual server for both the OPAC and INTRANET are mostly identical. For the purpose of illustrating, the steps for creating a virtual server for OPAC will be shown below.

To create the virtual server for INTRANET, replace opac (the word “opac” in italics) below with intranet.

1. Instantiate a new Generic server.

• Configure the host name and listening port(s) if you are not using the Virtual Host Matcher.
• Make sure the server URL is correct

1. Go into CGI support:

• Search path: /usr/local/koha/opac/cgi-bin
• Run scripts as: koha
• CGI-bin path: /cgi-bin/koha
• Extra environment variables: PERL5LIB=/usr/local/koha/intranet/modules

1. Go into Filesystem:

• Search path: /usr/local/koha/opac/htdocs

Your virtual server should now be ready.

You might want to disable RXML parsing for this virtual server, since this functionality is not needed for Koha.

You might want to add a new Filesystem module mounted on /opac-tmpl and leave the search path at NONE (or some empty directory).