Freeside:1.7:Documentation:InstallingUsingAPT

Introduction

Warnings!

The .deb installation of Freeside is experimental! The instructions below may be incomplete or incorrect and are subject to change. You should only attempt to use the .deb installation if you are prepared to work around omissions and inaccuracies, and can recover data in the event of a loss.

Make sure to remove any FS:: libraries installed in your Perl @INC (probaby under /usr/local/share/) before attempting to install a packaged Freeside. Also stop and remove any existing Freeside daemon processes and init scripts.

Information

The currently available Freeside packages are architecture-independent and are available for Debian 4.0 "etch" (stable) and Debian "sid" (unstable).

On Debian 4.0 "etch" (stable), additional perl modules not packaged in Debian proper are required. These packages are available from our repository for the i386 and amd64 architectures only.

Installing the .deb version of Freeside may not be a good idea if you plan to do development on Freeside as the .debs may not include all the files supplied in the tarball.

Status

The Debian version of Freeside does include Request Tracker at this time. There is no package of the self-service interface yet. A single package provides both PostgreSQL and MySQL support. Though the prompts ask you for many database options, only a local database via the default connection method works. The version and release of the Debian package is shown in the "Billing Main" page in Freeside.

Installation

• Add the following apt sources to /etc/apt/sources.list (for Debian 4.0 "etch" (stable)):

deb http://freeside.biz/~ivan/freeside-etch/ ./
deb http://freeside.biz/~ivan/freeside-1.7-etch/ ./

• OR, add the following apt source to /etc/apt/sources.list (for Debian "sid" (unstable)):

deb http://freeside.biz/~ivan/freeside-1.7-sid/ ./

• Run aptitude update.

• If you don't already have PostgreSQL or MySQL installed, run aptitude install postgresql-8.1 or aptitude install mysql.

• Run aptitude --visual-preview install freeside. Inspect the actions to be taken and then hit "g" to proceed. (If you're installing on an X-less machine, you may wish to do aptitude --visual-preview install freeside links to prevent extra dependencies from being pulled in).

• At this time, you can pick the database type (pgsql or mysql), database user and database name. Leave the other options (remote databases, alternate connection options) at their defaults.

Finalizing the installation

• Edit /etc/apache2/envvars or /etc/apache2/apache2.conf and set User and Group

to freeside

• /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

• Create one or more Freeside users (your internal sales/tech folks, not customer accounts):

$ su
# su freeside
$ freeside-adduser -g 1 username
$ htpasswd /etc/freeside/htpasswd username
(enter password)

• Go to http://your.host.name/freeside and log in.

• Proceed to the initial administration of your installation.