Installing Koha 2.0

Installation experiences…

I went to koha's main site and found a download link to sourceforge. Continuing, I found a tarball for koha-2.0.0, and grabbed it. After unpacking, I browsed the contents a bit.

The README had very little info, and said to run the installer. No INSTALL file was provided. I don't like running downloaded executables on my system; who knows what they might do? Such a script might assume things which are not true about me, or my system. I probably didn't even have its dependencies satisfied, so I decided to get more information first.

• ; Suggestion: Create an INSTALL file, and list all dependencies in it. Also, describe what the installer script does, in detail.

2.0.1 contains an INSTALL file which describes the installer

I looked at the koha site again, for installation info. It had a decent installation guide, here:

http://www.koha.org/installation/quick-start.html

I read the hints there, the faq, and the install guide. I located the debian packages for listed dependencies, and installed them. I got the rest of the deps from cpan, packaged them into .deb files, and installed them. Then I followed directions, and ended up without a working koha. This was partly because of a typo in apache's config, but mostly because I had tried to do as the install guide said.

• ; Suggestion: update the online docs to reflect the current version. Perhaps maintain them along with the koha source, and copy the files to the site whenever there is a new release. Or, at least, add a note to the online docs stating they do not apply to koha 2.0.0 or newer.

Eventually, I decided to run the installer, as a throwaway user, to see what it did. It informed me about additional dependencies, so I located and/or built those again, as needed. Continuing on, I learned all about what the installer does, but it failed to set up the database correctly. I got enough errors that I couldn't scroll back to see where they started. … I have a pretty long scrollback buffer. Anyway, the installer continued merrily along, having noticed nothing wrong.

• ; Suggestion: check for errors during installer operations.

It does, but not everything is caught. If something in particular tripped you up, please say how to reproduce the situation.

Other than the database errors, and the expected failure while trying to write to /etc, all went well. I decided to run it as root as soon as I got the database problem fixed. But, as it turns out, running as non-root was the problem. I discovered this after I found the koha IRC channel and chris helped me. (thanks!) It gets DB info from /etc instead of from the installer script, so failing to write /etc/koha.conf is fatal to the install.

• ; Suggestion: list the IRC channel somewhere on the main site; it was buried near the last hit on google.

• ; Suggestion: notify user that installer must be run as root. Or, add non-root installation capability. Or, abort install when writing to /etc fails, and explain why to the user.

The installer already has non-root capability and announces that in an early screen. 2.0.1 aborts if it etcdir is unwriteable.

Continuing, I ran the installer as root, and it worked. It still printed a bunch of red text during the database portion, but none of it was errors. I then looked at the apache config it generated, merged parts into my apache config, and tested. On the first try, it failed, but then I fixed a typo from earlier, and it worked. :)