Hilary is the back-end for the Open Academic Environment
The following guide will take you through the necessary steps to run the back-end for OAE (Hilary) and its reference UI (3akai-ux) for development purposes.
If you're installing on Windows (not recommended for production) there's a package manager called Chocolatey that can be used to install all the dependencies quickly. See the Windows Dependencies section of this document for more information.
Download and install the latest version of Node.js. Hilary is best tested with node 0.8.x (0.8.24 at time of writing), however is reported to work fine on at least 0.10.6 as well. Do not use any version prior to 0.8.x.
The Hilary back-end is written completely in JavaScript, powered by Node.js.
Download the latest version of Apache Cassandra 1.2 and extract it to a directory of your choice.
Important:
- Cassandra is best supported with the latest version of Oracle Java 6. Trying to run vanilla Cassandra with OpenJDK can result in a silent segmentation fault
- Hilary currently does not support Cassandra 2.0. Please be sure to use the latest stable release of 1.2
Create the following directories and set the owner to be the user that will be running Cassandra:
sudo mkdir -p /var/log/cassandra
sudo chown -R `whoami` /var/log/cassandra
sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/cassandra
sudo chown -R `whoami` /var/lib/cassandra
Then you can start Cassandra in the background by running the following:
cd my-cassandra-dir
bin/cassandra -f
To start it in the background, you can omit the -f parameter.
All Hilary data is stored in Apache Cassandra. Therefore it is not necessary to install any RDBMS such as MySQL or PostgreSQL.
Download and install (or compile) the latest version of Redis, please follow the installation instructions on the Redis download page. Once installed, you can start it by running the following:
cd my-redis-dir
src/redis-server
To start it in the background, you can update the redis.conf to set the property daemonize yes.
Redis is used for caching frequently accessed data and for broadcasting messages (PubSub) across the application cluster.
Download the latest version of ElasticSearch, and extract it to a directory of your choice. Once extracted, you can start it by running the following:
cd my-elasticsearch-dir
bin/elasticsearch -f
To start it in the background, you can omit the -f parameter.
ElasticSearch powers the full-text search functionality of OAE.
To install RabbitMQ, please follow the instructions on the RabbitMQ download page. Once completed, you should be able to start RabbitMQ by running the following:
rabbitmq-server
To start it in the background, you can run: rabbitmq-server -detached
RabbitMQ powers the asynchronous task-queue function in Hilary. It allows heavier "background" tasks such as activity processing, search indexing and preview processing to be off-loaded to specialized clusters of servers. Though, in a development environment you don't need to worry about specialized clusters, your development machine will do just fine out-of-the-box.
GraphicsMagick installation instructions can be found on their README page, however for *nix OS' it is typically available in the package manager of your choice (e.g., brew install graphicsmagick).
When installing GraphicsMagick manually, make sure you have at least libpng, libjpeg and Ghostscript installed.
GraphicsMagick provides the ability to crop and resize profile pictures, and is required to run Hilary.
The preview processor is not a requirement to run Hilary, but it certainly makes things look wonderful. It takes care of producing previews of content items for the UI (e.g., splitting PDFs into pages, cropping / resizing uploaded images). There are a few dependencies needed only if you are planning to run the preview processor:
Download and install PDFTK. This dependency takes care of splitting PDF files into individual pages.
Download and install LibreOffice. This dependency takes care of converting Microsoft Office files to PDFs so they may be further split into previews by PDFTK.
Download Nginx version 1.4.2 or higher. You will also need to download and extract PCRE, which will be used to configure Nginx.
Once you've downloaded and extracted both to directories of your choice, you can configure and install:
cd your-nginx-dir
./configure --with-pcre=/path/to/pcre
make
sudo make install
Nginx is the most tested load balancer and web server used for OAE. A web server such as Nginx is necessary for file downloads to work properly.
Etherpad is an open-source editor for online collaborative editing in real-time and is used to power the OAE collaborative documents. Follow the Etherpad README to get it installed.
Once you've installed the server you will also need the Etherpad OAE plugin. It's the glue for authenticating users between Hilary and etherpad-lite. The simplest method of installing the plugin is cloning it in the top node_modules folder that can be found in your etherpad-lite directory.
cd your-etherpad-dir
cd node_modules
git clone https://github.com/oaeproject/ep_oae
cd ..
You can copy or symlink the static/css/pad.css in the ep_oae module to your-etherpad-dir/src/static/custom/pad.css in order to apply the OAE skin on etherpad.
cd your-etherpad-dir
rm src/static/custom/pad.css
ln -s src/static/css/pad.css src/static/custom/pad.css
Next, we need to enable websockets as a way of communicating between Etherpad and Hilary. In order to do this, open the settings.json file in your favourite editor and change
"socketTransportProtocols" : ["xhr-polling", "jsonp-polling", "htmlfile"],
to
"socketTransportProtocols" : ["websocket", "xhr-polling", "jsonp-polling", "htmlfile"],
It is also recommended that you change the default pad text. In order to do this, open the settings.json file in your favourite editor and change
"defaultPadText" : "Welcome to Etherpad!\n\nThis pad text is synchronized ..."
to
"defaultPadText" : ""
You can optionally add the Etherpad headings plugin which allows you to use HTML headings in your document. The installation process is the same as the OAE plugin so it should be installed in the top-level node_modules directory.
cd your-etherpad-dir
cd ..
git clone git://github.com/fourplusone/etherpad-plugins.git
cd your-etherpad-dir
npm install your-etherpad-plugins-dir/ep_headings
Now, Etherpad can be started by running the following command:
bin/run.sh
To run it in the background, simply fork the process: bin/run.sh &
Open a command line and install Chocolatey with the following command:
@powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy unrestricted -Command "iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('http://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET PATH=%PATH%;%systemdrive%\chocolatey\bin
If you don't yet have git installed you can use Chocolatey to install it with cinst msysgit.
You can then install the remaining dependencies using the chocolatey.config in this repo:
cinst chocolatey.config
Note that this will install the dependencies, but doesn't necessarily configure and start them for you. You should still read the individual service sections of this document to ensure you've configured and started all the necessary services.
Windows has a few extra dependencies that are known to be needed:
Windows 7:
Windows 8:
By default, OAE assumes both the Hilary repository and the 3akai-ux repository are siblings in the same directory. If you want to make changes to the code, you will want your own fork of these repositories, which can then be used to push to and send pull requests from. If you are only trying to set up a new OAE instance, the Github repositories below should be sufficient. We now clone both of the repositories. If you have created your own forks of Hilary and 3akai-ux, please substitute the repositories below with your repositories:
~/oae$ git clone git://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary.git
~/oae$ git clone git://github.com/oaeproject/3akai-ux.git
Please remember that filenames and directories that contain spaces can sometimes result in unstable side-effects. Please ensure all paths are space-free.
OAE is a multi-tenant system that discriminates the tenant by the host name with which you are accessing the server. In order to support the "Global Tenant" (i.e., the tenant that hosts the administration UI) and a "User Tenant", you will need to have at least 2 different host names that point to your server. To do this, you will need to add the following entries to your /etc/hosts file:
127.0.0.1 admin.oae.com
127.0.0.1 tenant1.oae.com
Where "admin.oae.com" is the hostname that we will use to access the global administration tenant and "tenant1.oae.com" would be one of many potential user tenant hosts.
Open the config.js file in the root of the Hilary directory. This file contains a JavaScript object that represents the configuration for your server.
- Configure the
config.files.uploadDirproperty to point to a directory that exists. The reference to this directory should not have a trailing slash. This directory is used to store files such as profile pictures, content bodies, previews, etc... - Ensure that the property
config.server.globalAdminHostis configured to the same host name you set for your global admin host in /etc/hosts - Configure the
config.etherpad.apikeyproperty to the API Key that can be found inyour-etherpad-dir/APIKEY.txt
If you want preview processing enabled, configure the following:
- Ensure that the property
config.previews.enabledis set totrue - Ensure that the locations of the LibreOffice and PDFTK binaries are correct in the
config.previews.binariesproperty
Find the "nginx.conf" template file located in the nginx folder of the 3akai-ux (3akai-ux/nginx/nginx.conf) repository that you cloned earlier and perform the following edits:
- Replace
<%= nginxConf.NGINX_USER %>and<%= nginxConf.NGINX_GROUP %>with the OS user and group that the nginx process should run as - Replace
<%= nginxConf.NGINX_HOSTNAME %>with the same value you configured for the global administration server host in/etc/hosts(the one whose current value would be "admin.oae.com"). Note: Theserver_nameproperty for the user tenant server further down the configuration file should remain set to "*". - Replace all instances of
<%= nginxConf.UX_HOME %>with the full absolute path to your cloned 3akai-ux directory (e.g., /Users/branden/oae/3akai-ux) or the 3akai-ux production build directory (e.g., /Users/branden/oae/3akai-ux/target/optimized) - Replace
<%= nginxConf.LOCAL_FILE_STORAGE_DIRECTORY %>with the full absolute path that you configured as thelocalStorageDirectoryin thefilessection of the Hilaryconfig.jsfile. This path should not have a trailing slash
When you have finished making changes to the nginx.conf file, start Nginx:
sudo /usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx -c your-3akai-ux-dir/nginx/nginx.conf
NPM is the package manager that downloads all the Node.js dependencies on which Hilary relies. To tell NPM to download all the dependencies, run this command in your Hilary directory:
npm install -d
Now we're ready to start the app server. You can do so by going into the Hilary directory and running:
node app.js | node_modules/.bin/bunyan
To start it in the background, you can run: node app.js | node_modules/.bin/bunyan &. An upstart script can also be used to spawn and manage Hilary as a daemon process. The benefit of tying into upstart is that you get first-class support from deployment tools like MCollective and Puppet.
The server is now running and you can access the administration UI at http://admin.oae.com/!
Tip: If you install bunyan as a global depency with npm install -g bunyan, you can start the app instead with 'node app | bunyan'.
When you start the server, all data schemas will be created for you if they don't already exist. A global administrator user and global administration tenant will be ready for you as well. You can use these to create a new user tenant that hosts the actual OAE user interface.
- Visit http://admin.oae.com/ (substitute "admin.oae.com" with the administration host you configured in
/etc/hosts) - Log in with username and password: administrator / administrator
- Click "Create a new tenant"
- Choose an alias (a short, unique 2-5 character alphanumeric string such as "oae"), and a name of your liking.
- For the Host field, use the host you configured for your user tenant in
/etc/hosts(e.g., "tenant1.oae.com") - Click "Create new tenant"
That's it! You can now access the user tenant by their host http://tenant1.oae.com and start creating new users.
We're looking forward to seeing your contributions to the OAE project!