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Linux - Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

Most of the configuration steps described in this document apply to any modern Linux environment, however some of them will apply only to Ubuntu and likely to any Ubuntu-based distribution. Please be aware: we do our release development and testing using Ubuntu LTS releases, and cannot guarantee that other versions, distributions, or operating systems will work as expected with the following instructions.

This document is based in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa). Once you have installed it, you should be able to follow the instructions described below. In particular, we are going to use Ubuntu packages that can be found under the repositories main and universe.

Important

Please make sure you have reviewed the requirements before proceeding. Also, you may want to consider setting up the firewall before you start installing the services described below to avoid exposing them to outside access.

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Install the dependencies

MySQL

AtoM 2.8 requires MySQL 8.0 or higher as it uses common table expressions. Also, we’ve experienced very good results using Percona Server for MySQL 8.0, so don’t be afraid and use it if you want!

sudo apt update
sudo apt install mysql-server

Tip

The default MySQL installation is not completely secure, but it comes with a security script that can be executed to improve the default configuration:

sudo mysql_secure_installation

Finally, let’s configure our MySQL modes. The MySQL server can operate in different SQL modes, which affects the SQL syntax MySQL supports and the data validation checks it performs.

Paste the following values in a new file at /etc/mysql/conf.d/mysqld.cnf and save:

[mysqld]
sql_mode=ERROR_FOR_DIVISION_BY_ZERO,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION
optimizer_switch='block_nested_loop=off'

Now we’ll restart MySQL:

sudo systemctl restart mysql

Elasticsearch

A search server based on Apache Lucene and developed in Java that has brought AtoM a lot of advanced features, performance and scalability. This is probably the biggest change introduced in AtoM 2.x and we are pleased with the results.

Ubuntu doesn’t provide a package but you can download it directly from the Elasticsearch site if you are unable to download it using the method that follows.

Make sure that Java is installed. In this example we are going to use OpenJDK but Oracle’s JVM would also work.

sudo apt install openjdk-11-jre-headless apt-transport-https software-properties-common

After successfully installing Java, proceed to install Elasticsearch. Download and install the public signing key used in their repository:

wget -qO - https://artifacts.elastic.co/GPG-KEY-elasticsearch | sudo apt-key add -

Important

Don’t miss the dash ( - ) at the end of the above command!

Now add their repository:

echo "deb https://artifacts.elastic.co/packages/5.x/apt stable main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/elastic-5.x.list

Ready to be installed. Run:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install elasticsearch

Start the service and configure it to start when the system is booted.

sudo systemctl enable elasticsearch
sudo systemctl start elasticsearch

PHP

Ubuntu 20.04 bundles PHP 7.4, which is much faster than older releases. The following command will install it along with the rest of PHP extensions required by AtoM:

sudo apt install php-common php7.4-common php7.4-cli php7.4-curl php7.4-json php7.4-ldap php7.4-mysql php7.4-opcache php7.4-readline php7.4-xml php7.4-mbstring php7.4-xsl php7.4-zip php-apcu php-apcu-bc

If you are using Memcached as cache engine, you will also need to install php-memcache:

sudo apt install php-memcache

Gearman job server

Gearman job server is required by AtoM as of version 2.2.

sudo apt install gearman-job-server

Other packages

In order to generate PDF finding aids, AtoM requires Apache FOP to be installed. Fortunately, Apache FOP can now be installed directly from Ubuntu packages using the command below.

Note

The command specified below uses the --no-install-recommends parameter: this is intentional and ensures that only dependencies are installed and not ‘recommended’ packages. If --no-install-recommends is not specified, openjdk-8-jre will be installed as a dependency for one of the recommended packages. Since openjdk-8-jre-headless was already installed in the Elasticsearch installation section above, we want to prevent installing the openjdk-8-jre package as well.

sudo apt install --no-install-recommends fop libsaxon-java

Make sure the default java command points to the java version 11 binary (ignore errors):

sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-1.11.0-openjdk-amd64

Tip

To list all the available jdk installs and the java update-alternatives selections:

sudo update-java-alternatives -l
sudo update-alternatives --get-selections | grep java

If you want AtoM to be able to process digital objects in formats like JPEG or to extract the text from your PDF documents, there are certain packages that you need to install. They are not mandatory but if they are found in the system, AtoM will use them to produce digital object derivatives from your master objects. for more information on each, see: Requirements: other dependencies. The following will install all the recommended dependencies at once:

sudo apt install imagemagick ghostscript poppler-utils ffmpeg

Download AtoM

Now that we have installed and configured all dependencies, we are ready to download and install AtoM itself. The safest way is to install AtoM from the tarball, which you can find in the download section. However, experienced users may prefer to check out the code from our public repository.

The following instructions assume that we are installing AtoM under /usr/share/nginx and that you are using AtoM 2.8.0.

Option 1: Download the tarball

wget https://storage.accesstomemory.org/releases/atom-2.8.0.tar.gz
sudo mkdir /usr/share/nginx/atom
sudo tar xzf atom-2.8.0.tar.gz -C /usr/share/nginx/atom --strip 1

Please note that the tarball may not be available yet if this version is still in development. In this case, you can try the alternative installation method explained below.

Option 2: Check out the code from our git repository

Install git:

sudo apt install git
sudo mkdir -p /usr/share/nginx/atom
sudo git clone -b stable/2.8.x http://github.com/artefactual/atom.git /usr/share/nginx/atom

If you are not interested in downloading all the history from git, you could also truncate it to a specific number of revisions, e.g.: just one revision

git clone -b stable/2.8.x --depth 1 http://github.com/artefactual/atom.git /usr/share/nginx/atom

We use Composer to install and manage some third-party PHP libraries. To install Composer download and run the Composer installer according to the instructions at https://getcomposer.org/download/ in the “Command-line installation” section.

Once Composer is installed you will need to run it to install the required libraries. First, move to the AtoM folder:

cd /usr/share/nginx/atom

For production sites, the development libraries do not need to be included:

sudo ~/composer.phar install --no-dev

Or if you have installed Composer globally:

sudo composer install --no-dev

For development environments, the dev libraries should also be installed:

sudo ~/composer.phar install

After downloading the code, you will need to compile the themes files:

Compile Bootstrap 5 Theme Files:

sudo npm install
sudo npm run build

Compile Bootstrap 2 Theme Files:

sudo apt install npm make
sudo npm install -g "less@<4.0.0" n
sudo n stable
sudo npm install
sudo npm run build
sudo make -C /usr/share/nginx/atom/plugins/arDominionPlugin
sudo make -C /usr/share/nginx/atom/plugins/arArchivesCanadaPlugin
sudo rm -rf node_modules

Create the database

Assuming that you are running MySQL in localhost, please create the database by running the following command using the password you created earlier:

sudo mysql -h localhost -u root -p -e "CREATE DATABASE atom CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci;"

Note

If you do not supply the MySQL root password after the -p, you will be prompted for it when you enter the command. If you do supply the password, there is no space following -p; in other words, -pPASSWORD. (Replace PASSWORD with the password you created.) Remember, supplying the password on the command line is less secure as it may be visible to others in the .bash_history file.

Notice that the database has been called atom. Feel free to change its name.

In case your MySQL server is not the same as your web server, replace “localhost” with the address of your MySQL server.

Warning

Please make sure that you are using an empty database! Don’t reuse an old database unless it’s empty. You can always drop it by using the DROP DATABASE command and then create it again.

Additionally, it’s always a good idea to create a specific MySQL user for AtoM to keep things safer. This is how you can create a user called atom with password 12345 and the permissions needed for the database created above.

sudo mysql -h localhost -u root -p -e "CREATE USER 'atom'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '12345';"
sudo mysql -h localhost -u root -p -e "GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON atom.* TO 'atom'@'localhost';"

Note that the INDEX, CREATE and ALTER privileges are only necessary during the installation process or when you are upgrading AtoM to a newer version. They can be removed from the user once you are finished with the installation or you can change the user used by AtoM in config.php.

Run the installer

You should now be ready to run the installer. It’s a simple command line interface task that configures AtoM according to your environment, adds the necessary tables and initial data to the recently created database and creates the Elasticsearch index.

cd /usr/share/nginx/atom
php symfony tools:install

The installation task will ask for configuration details such as the location of your database server. In some cases, it may provide default values, such as atom for the database name. If you have followed this document to the letter (including creating a different database user in the database configuration step above, this is how you should fill the configuration:

  • Database host: localhost
  • Database port: 3306
  • Database name: atom
  • Database user: atom
  • Database password: 12345
  • Search host: localhost
  • Search port: 9200
  • Search index: atom

Of course, some of these values will look very different if you are running AtoM in a distributed way, where your services like MySQL or Elasticsearch are running in separate machines.

The rest of the configuration can be filled as you need:

  • Site title
  • Site description
  • Site base URL
  • Admin email
  • Admin username
  • Admin password

Tip

You can always change the site title, site description, and Base URL later via Admin > Settings > Site information. See: Site information for more information. The admin email, username and password can also be changed by an administrator after installation via the user interface - see: Edit an existing user.

For more information about this task, including ways to automate it, check its full documentation in the command line tools page.

Configure

There are various settings that can only be configured via the command-line - for example, the default timezone and culture of the application. Depending on your local requirements, it may be preferable to configure some of these now. For more information on these settings see: Manage AtoM configuration files.

Security considerations

Now that AtoM is configured and installed, please take a moment to read our security section where we will show you how to configure the firewall in Ubuntu and other options in AtoM configuration.

We strongly encourage our users to configure a firewall because some of the services configured should not be exposed in the wild, e.g. Elasticsearch was not designed to be accessible from untrusted networks and it’s a common attack vector.

Serve

There are many web servers out there capable of working well with PHP. Apache is probably the most popular and we like it, but we’ve found that Nginx adapts itself much better to limited resource environments while it also scales better and more predictably under high loads. You are welcome to try other solutions, but the following documentation will focus on Nginx and PHP-FPM.

Additionally, AtoM requires the configuration of a Gearman worker service.

Filesystem permissions

By default, Nginx runs as the www-data user. There are a few directories under AtoM that must be writable by the web server. The easiest way to ensure this is to update the owner of the AtoM directory and its contents by running:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /usr/share/nginx/atom

If you are deploying AtoM in a shared environment we recommend you to pay attention to the permissions assigned to others. The following is an example on how to clear all mode bits for others:

sudo chmod o= /usr/share/nginx/atom

If you are planning to do DIP uploads from AM, check the SWORD deposit directory section to set the permissions of that directory.

Deployment of workers

Gearman is used in AtoM to support asynchronous tasks, some of which are core functionality such as updating the publication status of a descriptive hierarchy, moving descriptions to a new parent record, and much more. A worker is just a CLI task that you can run in a terminal or supervise with specific tools like upstart, supervisord or systemd. The worker will wait for jobs that are assigned by the job server.

We will use systemd to manage the AtoM worker; create the following service file /usr/lib/systemd/system/atom-worker.service:

[Unit]
Description=AtoM worker
After=network.target
# High interval and low restart limit to increase the possibility
# of hitting the rate limits in long running recurrent jobs.
StartLimitIntervalSec=24h
StartLimitBurst=3

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=www-data
Group=www-data
WorkingDirectory=/usr/share/nginx/atom
ExecStart=/usr/bin/php7.4 -d memory_limit=-1 -d error_reporting="E_ALL" symfony jobs:worker
KillSignal=SIGTERM
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=30

Important

If you are not using PHP 7.4, be sure to update the ExecStart filepath in the [Service] section of the sample configuration block above! Currently it assumes PHP 7.4 is being used, and will not work for installations using a different PHP version without modification.

Now reload systemd, enable and start the AtoM worker:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable atom-worker
sudo systemctl start atom-worker

Check out the following page for more information about asynchronous jobs and worker management: Asynchronous jobs and worker management.

PHP-FPM

Our favorite way to deploy AtoM is using PHP-FPM, a process manager that scales better than other solutions like FastCGI.

sudo apt install php7.4-fpm

Let’s add a new PHP pool for AtoM by adding the following contents in a new file called /etc/php/7.4/fpm/pool.d/atom.conf:

[atom]

; The user running the application
user = www-data
group = www-data

; Use UNIX sockets if Nginx and PHP-FPM are running in the same machine
listen = /run/php7.4-fpm.atom.sock
listen.owner = www-data
listen.group = www-data
listen.mode = 0600

; The following directives should be tweaked based in your hardware resources
pm = dynamic
pm.max_children = 30
pm.start_servers = 10
pm.min_spare_servers = 10
pm.max_spare_servers = 10
pm.max_requests = 200

chdir = /

; Some defaults for your PHP production environment
; A full list here: http://www.php.net/manual/en/ini.list.php
php_admin_value[expose_php] = off
php_admin_value[allow_url_fopen] = on
php_admin_value[memory_limit] = 512M
php_admin_value[max_execution_time] = 120
php_admin_value[post_max_size] = 72M
php_admin_value[upload_max_filesize] = 64M
php_admin_value[max_file_uploads] = 10
php_admin_value[cgi.fix_pathinfo] = 0
php_admin_value[display_errors] = off
php_admin_value[display_startup_errors] = off
php_admin_value[html_errors] = off
php_admin_value[session.use_only_cookies] = 0

; APC
php_admin_value[apc.enabled] = 1
php_admin_value[apc.shm_size] = 64M
php_admin_value[apc.num_files_hint] = 5000
php_admin_value[apc.stat] = 0

; Zend OPcache
php_admin_value[opcache.enable] = 1
php_admin_value[opcache.memory_consumption] = 192
php_admin_value[opcache.interned_strings_buffer] = 16
php_admin_value[opcache.max_accelerated_files] = 4000
php_admin_value[opcache.validate_timestamps] = 0
php_admin_value[opcache.fast_shutdown] = 1

; This is a good place to define some environment variables, e.g. use
; ATOM_DEBUG_IP to define a list of IP addresses with full access to the
; debug frontend or ATOM_READ_ONLY if you want AtoM to prevent
; authenticated users
env[ATOM_DEBUG_IP] = "10.10.10.10,127.0.0.1"
env[ATOM_READ_ONLY] = "off"

The process manager has to be enabled and started:

sudo systemctl enable php7.4-fpm
sudo systemctl start php7.4-fpm

If the service fails to start, make sure that the configuration file has been has been pasted properly. You can also check the syntax by running:

sudo php-fpm7.4 --test

If you are not planning to use the default PHP pool (www), feel free to remove it:

sudo rm /etc/php/7.4/fpm/pool.d/www.conf
sudo systemctl restart php7.4-fpm

Nginx

In Ubuntu, the installation of Nginx is simple:

sudo apt install nginx

Warning

These instructions assume that the Nginx package is creating the directory /usr/share/nginx and that is the location where we are going to place the AtoM sources. However, we have been told this location may be different in certain environments (e.g. /var/www) or you may opt for a different location. If that is the case, please make sure that you update the configuration snippets that we share later in this document according to your location.

Nginx deploys a default server (aka VirtualHost, for Apache users) called default and you can find it in /etc/nginx/sites-available/default. In order to install AtoM you could edit the existing server block or add a new one. We are going to you show you how to do the latter:

sudo touch /etc/nginx/sites-available/atom
sudo ln -sf /etc/nginx/sites-available/atom /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/atom
sudo rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

We have now created the configuration file and linked it from sites-enabled/, which is the directory that Nginx will look for. This means that you could disable a site by removing its symlink from sites-enabled/ while keeping the original one under sites-available/, in case that you want to re-use it in the future. You can do this with the Nginx default server.

The following is a recommended server block for AtoM. Put the following contents in /etc/nginx/sites-available/atom.

Warning

This example listens for connections on port 80 using basic http without encryption.

While this is ok for testing AtoM locally on a private network, any public implementation of AtoM should be secured using TLS/SSL certificates such that your content is served over HTTPS.

The Mozilla SSL Configuration Generator is useful for assisting with adding the appropriate blocks to your Nginx configuration file.

upstream atom {
   server unix:/run/php7.4-fpm.atom.sock;
}

server {

   listen 80;
   root /usr/share/nginx/atom;

   # http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpCoreModule#server_name
   # _ means catch any, but it's better if you replace this with your server
   # name, e.g. archives.foobar.com
   server_name _;

   client_max_body_size 72M;

   location ~* ^/(css|dist|js|images|plugins|vendor)/.*\.(css|png|jpg|js|svg|ico|gif|pdf|woff|ttf)$ {

   }

   location ~* ^/(downloads)/.*\.(pdf|xml|html|csv|zip|rtf)$ {

   }

   location ~ ^/(ead.dtd|favicon.ico|robots.txt|sitemap.*)$ {

   }

   location / {
      try_files $uri /index.php?$args;
      if (-f $request_filename) {
         return 403;
      }
   }

   location ~* /uploads/r/(.*)/conf/ {

   }

   location ~* ^/uploads/r/(.*)$ {
      include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
      set $index /index.php;
      fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$index;
      fastcgi_param SCRIPT_NAME $index;
      fastcgi_pass atom;
   }

   location ~ ^/private/(.*)$ {
      internal;
      alias /usr/share/nginx/atom/$1;
   }

   location ~ ^/(index|qubit_dev)\.php(/|$) {
      include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
      fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
      fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.*)$;
      fastcgi_pass atom;
   }

}

Now you need to enable and reload Nginx:

sudo systemctl enable nginx
sudo systemctl reload nginx

Start using AtoM

Congratulations! Your new AtoM 2.8 installation should now be ready to use. You can access it by entering your base URL into a web browser - the administrator account login details will be those you entered when configuring the installer. See Getting Started for further information on your first steps using AtoM.

Tip

After implementing the above changes during the initial setup, you might need to clear the cache and restart PHP-FPM for the changes to take effect.

If you encounter any other issues, we recommend consulting the Troubleshooting documentation for suggestions on how to resolve common errors.

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