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 has been reported to work. 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
  • Time-Duration
  • File-CounterFile
  • FreezeThaw
  • String-Approx
  • Text-Template
  • Archive-Tar
  • DBI
  • DBD for your database engine
  • DBIx-DataSource
  • DBIx-DBSchema
  • Net-SSH
  • String-ShellQuote
  • Net-SCP
  • Apache::ASP or HTML::Mason
  • Tie-IxHash

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

    $ su postgres
    $ createuser -P freeside

  • 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_ADMIN_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.