- Getting Started with OpenACS
- Getting Started
- Download and Unpack the Tools
- Install and Configure PostgeSQL
- Install and Configure AOLserver
- Configure OpenACS
- Start AOLserver
Install and Configure AOLserver
Log in as user aolserver, and use tar to extract the files from the tarball if you have not done so already. They'll be extracted into a directory tree named aolserver_3.0. First, you'll use gmake to build AOLserver. Code listing 1 details this operation.
I used tail to verify that the build succeeded.
Now run make install:
[aolserver@goshawk aolserver3_0]$ make install
You now need to build a database driver—in this case, the driver for PostgreSQL—and you should check to make sure that it was built correctly. This is shown in code listing 2.
Next, copy the shared object library to AOLserver's collection of binaries, and go back to the home directory of user aolserver:
[aolserver@goshawk nspostgres]$ cp nspostgres.so ../bin [aolserver@goshawk nspostgres]$ cd ..
You're now ready to configure AOLserver. Myriad configuration parameters are available, so I've included a sample configuration file (a pop-up window—see the end of this article for the complete text) in order to simplify the process. Cut and paste this file into the home directory of the aolserver user, and name it acs-pg.tcl. You'll have to edit this file slightly to match your particular computer and network configuration. Following are the lines that need to be edited:
set httpport 8000 set httpsport 8443 set hostname "goshawk" set address 192.168.1.4
On my local network, the machine I used to generate these examples is named goshawk and is located at IP address 192.168.1.4. The sample configuration file listens for HTTP requests on port 8000, which allows you to run AOLserver and test your site without becoming root. The configuration file also defines a port for the secure HTTPS protocol. Despite this, my sample initialization file does not enable HTTPS. Enabling it complicates matters considerably, so this can safely be delayed until you need secure data transfer—for instance, to accept credit card numbers in the e-commerce module.
If you want to configure the server to listen on the default HTTP port instead, change httpport to 80 and start AOLserver when you're logged in as root. However, I do not recommend this until you get some experience with AOLserver.
If you've created a user named acs and have also loaded the datamodel into a database named acs, no more editing of the sample acs-pg.tcl file is required. The last step, copying virtual-server specific information from a template provided with AOLserver, is simple:
[aolserver@goshawk aolserver]$ cp -R servers/server1 servers/acspg