3. Getting Ready to Install

This section describes the filesystem location conventions of OpenACS, as well as how to initially unpack the files. These locations vary, depending on which installation approach is used.

Untarring is what those installing from source code will do; those installing from RPMs will do something using rpm, those installing from .deps will use apt-get.

3.1. Getting Ready to Untar [1]

We recommend rooting Web server content in /web (typically a symlink to a large mirrored disk drive). Since most servers these days are expected to run multiple services from multiple IP addresses, each server gets a subdirectory from /web. For example, http://scorecard.org would be rooted at /web/scorecard on one of our machines and if http://jobdirect.com were on the same box then it would be at /web/jobdirect.

For the sake of argument, we're going to assume that your service is called "yourdomain", is going to be at http://yourdomain.com and is rooted at /web/yourdomain in the Unix file system. Note that you'll find our definitions files starting out with "yourdomain.com".

3.2. Installing OpenACS from RPMs

The use of /web is conventional in the ACS community, but conflicts with the Linux File Hierarchy Standard. When installing from binary RPMs, the service is installed under /var/lib/aolserver/servers/ and the default OpenACS service is therefore installed at /var/lib/aolserver/servers/defaultacs/ -- all this happens transparently as the RPMs are installed. With the appropriate OpenACS RPM file in the current directory, the single command

rpm -Uvh *.rpm

should be all that is required.

3.3. Installing OpenACS from Debian GNU/Linux .deb files

OpenACS Debian packages are included in Debian's unstable distribution (woody), so you'll need the appropriate entries in your /etc/apt-sources.list to get it. All you need to do is some apt-getting:
apt-get install openacs
and that's it. NOTE: At the time of writing, the OpenACS Debian packages are outdated.