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WIRM Installation Guide

Here are step-by-step instructions on getting WIRM up and running on your own system.

Wirm currently runs on the "LAMP" platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl. For general help configuring the LAMP platform, try O'Reilly's www.OnLAMP.org.

Windows? It should be straightforward to port Wirm to a Windows environment, as all the required components are known to have Win32 versions, but we have not yet attempted to do so. Want to try? Write volunteer@wirm.org.

Other platforms? Wirm can run on other flavors of Unix, and with other databases, such as Oracle. Some custom configuration may be required.

The steps for installing WIRM are:

Install Prerequisite Software
Configure Web server
Download WIRM
Extract the tar file and examine the directory structure
Edit the Configuration File
Run the Installation Script
Test the Installation

Install Prerequisite Software

Prior to installing WIRM, you must have each of the the following software packages installed and tested:

perl5
Apache web server
MySQL database
ImageMagick and the PerlMagick interface.
CGI Perl module
DBI Perl module and DBD::mysql (or the driver for your preferred database)

Configure Web server

WIRM requires a web server to run properly. The only server it has been tested on is apache runing under unix. In order to run WIRM as it is delivered, apache must be configured to follow symbolic links (if you don't want to allow that you'll need to modify the installation script so it copies rather than links the needed directories).

For our apache server symlinks are enabled by setting the option, FollowSymLinks for the document root directory, the cgi-bin directory, and the user cgi-bin and public_html directories.

If you want to install wirm in a personal user directory you need to enable both the public_html mechanism, and the use of personal cgi-bin directories. Consult your apache manual for instructions on how to do this.

Download WIRM

If you haven't already done so, get the latest release of the WIRM library and CGI scripts from the WIRM Download Page . There you will be given instructions on downloading the tarfile wirm-xxx.tar, where xxx is the version. If you are using the local CVS system, just do, from the directory where you want to install wirm:

cvs checkout -d wirm src/wirm

Extract the tar file and/or examine the directory structure

% tar -xvf wirm-xxx.tar

This will create a directory tree rooted at wirm. Go into the wirm directory. You should see the following:

README repos wrm

wrm contains the generic toolkit used by all repositories, repos contains the individual repositories found on this server. Initially repos contains demo_repo, the lending library that is the subject of the tutorial. If checking out from CVS, repos will contain all repositories checked into CVS, but you need only worry about the ones you are interested in.

Within wirm/wrm you should see:

ChangeLog README cgi htdocs lib

cgi has cgi scripts that will be called from a web server cgi-bin directory, htdocs has icons, docs and other html pages that will be served from the web servers documents directory, lib has scripts that are called by the cgi-bin scripts, as well as additional subdirectories containing backup, installation and miscelaneous scripts. The installation script will link to the cgi and htdocs directories from within the web server's cgi-bin and htdocs directories.

Each repository is a subdirectory of wirm/repos, where the subdirectory name is the name of the repository, and is also the name of the msql database. Within each repository the subdirectories are organized similarly to the wrm toolkit, as cgi, lib and htdocs.

Edit the configuration file

 cd wirm/wrm/lib

Copy the file conf.pl.sample to conf.pl.

Invoke your text editor on conf.pl. You will note at least two configuration templates that assign initial values to the hash %WRM_CONF. The first is for installation in an individual user's public_html and cgi-bin directories. The second is for installation in shared space. Keep only the template relevant to your installation, and delete the others (there should be only one assignment to %WRM_CONF in conf.pl.

Edit the values for the following variables:

wirm_install : the installation path for wirm, should end in wirm.
admin_pass : the password used to access certain protected repository facilities, such as the schema-evolve script.
var : The path to the directory where individual repository data will be stored, including the file storage area, the visualization cache, the schema-defs and the repo-types file. This, plus the msql database, constitutes the entire data for a given repository. In a shared environment wirm can be installed in a shared directory, but each individual server can have a local var directory, which will mean that the data instances will be different for each machine.
htdocs : the virtual location of your top level web document directory, as would be specified in a URL.
doc_root : the actual file system path to your web server's document root, or the path to a user's public_html directory.
cgi : the virtual location of your top-level cgi directory, such as would be specified in a URL.
cgi_path : the actual file system path to your top-level cgi directory.
mime_general : the location of your system's mime.types file.

Run the Installation Script

Important: you must have write access to the var, doc_root and cgi_path directories, as described above:

 cd wirm/wrm/lib/conf

Make sure that install.pl is executable, then

Execute the script install.pl.

Test the Installation

Test the initial installation by accessing the URL:

http://yourserver/cgi-bin/wrm/console.pl

(or whatever the appropriate cgi-bin directory as specified in conf.pl). A page should appear with the repository banner, saying that you must first set the repository, which can't be done until a repository is created or installed.

For further help installing WIRM, please email info@wirm.org.