Freeside:1.7:Documentation:Installation

Introduction

Install Freeside on a firewalled, private server, not a public (web, RADIUS, etc.) server.

Please note that these are the 1.7 installation instructions. Do not attempt to use them to install 1.5/1.6, or edit them to correct differences with those releases.

Prerequisites

Packages

• Perl, minimum version 5.8.4
• Apache, SSL highly recommended
• mod_perl
  • mod_perl v2 is now supported.
  • If compiling your own mod_perl, make sure you set the EVERYTHING=1 compile-time option
• A transactional database engine supported by Perl's DBI.
  • PostgreSQL is recommended (v7.2 or later, 7.4 or later recommended).
  • MySQL is not currently supported. Developers intersted in maintaining MySQL support are welcome to ask on the -devel mailing list; most things work, but MySQL support needs a maintainer to update it for recent (and future) changes.

Note: the above only applies to the database used by the Freeside software itself. Freeside can integrate with RADIUS and other servers running MySQL or any other DBI-supported database.

• teTeX and Ghostscript (included with most distributions) (Optional, enables typeset invoices)

Perl modules

Popular modules you might want to check your distribution for

• libnet (CPAN: "install Net::Cmd")
• libwww-perl (CPAN: "install Bundle::LWP")
  • URI
  • HTML::Tagset
  • HTML::Parser
• HTML::Mason
• Text::Template
• DBI
  • DBD for your database engine (DBD::Pg for PostgreSQL)
• MailTools (CPAN: "install Mail::Internet")
• MIME::Tools
• TimeDate (CPAN: "install Date::Format")
• Locale-Codes (CPAN: "install Locale::Country")
• DateTime

Modules of Indeterminate Popularity

• Chart (CPAN: "install Chart::Base")
• Cache::Cache
• NetAddr::IP
• String::Approx
• Locale::SubCountry
• Frontier::RPC2
• Term::ReadKey
• Date::Manip
• DateTime::Format::Strptime
• Text::CSV_XS

Less common modules probably not included in anything but Debian?

• Business::CreditCard
• Net::Whois::Raw
• DBIx::DBSchema
• Tie::IxHash
• Crypt::PasswdMD5
• Time::Duration
• File::CounterFile
• IPC::Run3
• Net::SSH
• String::ShellQuote
• JSON
• HTML::Widgets::SelectLayers
• Color::Scheme
• Lingua::EN::NameParse
• Lingua::EN::Inflect

Optional modules

• Fax::Hylafax::Client (Required if faxing invoices)
• Apache::DBI (recommended for better web interface performance)

Installation

• Add the user and group `freeside' to your system.
• Allow the freeside user full access to the freeside database.
  • with PostgreSQL

$ su postgres (pgsql on some distributions)
$ createuser -P freeside
Enter password for user "freeside": 
Enter it again: 
Shall the new user be allowed to create databases? (y/n) y
Shall the new user be allowed to create more new users? (y/n) n
CREATE USER

or with MySQL:

$ mysqladmin -u root password 'set_a_root_database_password'
$ mysql -u root -p
mysql> GRANT SELECT,INSERT,UPDATE,DELETE,INDEX,ALTER,CREATE,DROP on freeside.* TO freeside@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'set_a_freeside_database_password';

• Edit the top-level Makefile:
  • Set DATASOURCE to your DBI data source, for example, DBI:Pg:dbname=freeside for PostgresSQL or DBI:mysql:freeside for MySQL. See the DBI manpage and the manpage for your DBD for the exact syntax of your DBI data source.
  • Set DB_PASSWORD to the freeside database user's password.

• Add the freeside database to your database engine:
  • with Postgres:

$ su freeside
$ createdb -E sql_ascii freeside

or with MySQL:

$ mysqladmin -u freeside -p create freeside 

• Build and install the Perl modules:

$ make perl-modules
$ su
# make install-perl-modules

• Create the necessary configuration files:

$ su
# make create-config

• Ensure Apache has mod_perl enabled and is set to run as User freeside. If you have other things being served by Apache on this machine (hopefully internal things), it is recommended to run a separate iteration of Apache as the freeside user.

• Edit the Makefile and set FREESIDE_DOCUMENT_ROOT.

• Run make install-docs

• Edit the Makefile and set APACHE_CONF to the location of an Apache include directory (not a file). (If your Apache doesn't have an existing include directory, create one and add a line such as "Include /etc/apache/conf.d" to httpd.conf.)

• Run make install-apache

• As the freeside UNIX user, run freeside-setup -d your.domain.name to create the database tables and initial data.

$ su freeside
$ freeside-setup -d example.com

• Create the Freeside system users:

$ su freeside
$ freeside-adduser -g 1 fs_queue
$ freeside-adduser -g 1 fs_daily
$ freeside-adduser -g 1 fs_selfservice

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

$ su freeside
$ freeside-adduser -g 1 username
$ htpasswd /usr/local/etc/freeside/htpasswd username
Password: 

Additional users can be added using the same command or from the web interface.

• freeside-queued was installed with the Perl modules. Start it now and ensure that is run upon system startup (Do this manually, or edit the top-level Makefile, replacing INIT_FILE with the appropriate location on your system and QUEUED_USER with the username of a Freeside user you created above, and run make install-init)

• Either install the integrated RT ticketing system, or delete the ticket_system file from your configuration directory (/usr/local/etc/freeside/conf.datasrc).

• Now proceed to the initial administration of your installation.