Installation

• A web server, such as Apache-SSL or Apache
• mod_perl
• SSH (OpenSSH is recommended. SSH Communications Security commercial SSH version 3 has been reported incompatible with Freeside.)
• Perl Don't enable experimental features like threads or the PerlIO abstraction layer.
• A transactional database engine supported by Perl's DBI.
  • PostgreSQL (v7 or higher) is recommended.
  • MySQL does not work at this time. The following information is provided for developers who wish to contribute MySQL support: See tickets #300 and #334 in the bug-tracking system. MySQL's default MyISAM and ISAM table types are not supported. If you really want to use MySQL, you need to use one of the new transaction-safe table types such as BDB, and set it as the default table type using the --default-table-type=BDB mysqld command-line option or by setting default-table-type=BDB in the my.cnf option file.
• Perl modules (CPAN will query, download and build perl modules automatically)
  • Array-PrintCols
  • Term-Query (make test broken; install manually)
  • MIME-Base64
  • Digest-MD5
  • URI
  • HTML-Tagset
  • HTML-Parser
  • libnet
  • Locale-Codes
  • Net-Whois
  • libwww-perl
  • Business-CreditCard
  • Data-ShowTable
  • MailTools
  • TimeDate
  • DateManip
  • File-CounterFile
  • FreezeThaw
  • String-Approx
  • Text-Template
  • Archive-Tar
  • DBI
  • DBD for your database engine (DBD::Pg for PostgreSQL, DBD::mysql for MySQL)
  • DBIx-DataSource
  • DBIx-DBSchema
  • Net-SSH
  • String-ShellQuote
  • Net-SCP
  • Apache::ASP or HTML::Mason
  • Tie-IxHash
  • Time-Duration

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

    $ su postgres
    $ 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

  • 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';

• Unpack the tarball:

  gunzip -c fs-x.y.z.tar.gz | tar xvf -

• Edit the top-level Makefile:
  • Set DATASOURCE to your DBI data source, for example, DBI:Pg:host=localhost;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 a DBI data source.
  • Set DB_PASSWORD to the freeside database user's password.
• Add the freeside database to your database engine:

  $ su
  # make create-database

  (or manually, with Postgres:)

  $ su freeside
  $ createdb freeside

  (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
  

• You should run a separate iteration of Apache[-SSL] with mod_perl enabled as the freeside user.

• Restrict access to this web interface - see the Apache documentation on user authentication. For example, to configure user authentication with mod_auth (flat files):

  <Directory /usr/local/apache/htdocs/freeside-asp>
  PerlSetVar Global /usr/local/etc/freeside/asp-global/
  AuthName Freeside
  AuthType Basic
  AuthUserFile /usr/local/etc/freeside/htpasswd
  require valid-user
  </Directory>
  

• Create one or more Freeside users (your internal sales/tech folks, not customer accounts). These users are setup using using Apache authentication, not UNIX user accounts. For example, using mod_auth (flat files):
  • First user:

    $ su
    $ freeside-adduser -c -h /usr/local/etc/freeside/htpasswd username

  • Additional users:

    $ su
    $ freeside-adduser -h /usr/local/etc/freeside/htpasswd username

  (using other auth types, add each user to your Apache authentication and then run: freeside-adduser username
• As the freeside UNIX user, run bin/fs-setup username to create the database tables, passing the username of a Freeside user you created above:

  $ su freeside
  $ bin/fs-setup username
  

• freeside-queued was installed with the Perl modules. Start it now and ensure that is run upon system startup.
• Now proceed to the initial administration of your installation.