Gears Installation

Gears Components

While the architecture of COmanage Gears describes three separate components of COordinate (the backend system), COnsole (the web UI), and the REST COnnectors (for XML and JSON data transfers), the actual implementation is based on an MVC framework called CakePHP. As such, the technical implementation consists of one package, where the boundaries separating these three components is somewhat fuzzy.

Prerequisites

While COmanage Gears is designed to work in a LAMP environment, the only required component is PHP. Other modern operating systems, web servers, and databases should all work. Configuration of these prerequisites is generally beyond the scope of this documentation.

PHP

PHP 5.2 or later is required. No special build options are currently required, other than support for whatever database you plan on using.

Install Source

Download the COmanage Gears source files to your selected directory.

$ svn co http://anonsvn.internet2.edu/svn/gears/tags/0.1d
$ ln -s 0.1d gears

Web Server Setup

The web server should operate under SSL. Make sure the server is capable of rendering PHP.

Install the COmanage Gears directory wherever you like, and configure your web server to deliver it at a suitable URL (such as https://site.edu/gears or https://gears.site.edu). Specifically, set the web server to deliver gears/app/webroot as the document root.

You should verify that the web server will not deliver unprocessed files, especially configuration files such as the database configuration file (ie: https://site.edu/gears/app/config/database.php). By default, these files will not be delivered.

You'll most likely want to move the gears/app/tmp directory, since it is bad practice to have writable directories on the file system delivering web content. A reasonable alternative would be /var/cache/gears. The easiest way to do this on a Unix-like system is to create a symlink to the new directory.

$ cd gears/app
$ sudo cp -r tmp /var/cache/gears
$ sudo chown -R $HTTPUSER /var/cache/gears
$ sudo chmod 700 /var/cache/gears
$ mv tmp tmp.not
$ ln -s /var/cache/gears tmp

In order to integrate COmanage Gears with your authentication system, configure your Web server to protect the directory gears/app/webroot/auth/login. For example, under Apache you may place an .htaccess the file in that directory with contents similar to this:

AuthType shibboleth
ShibRequestSetting requireSession 1
require valid-user

Database Server Setup

COmanage Gears is tested against Postgres and MySQL, but should work against any database supported by CakePHP.

If you are using MySQL, use the InnoDB storage engine, not MyISAM. To set this as the default storage engine on a Unix-like system, add the following to /etc/my.cnf and restart mysql before setting up the database tables:

# Set default engine to InnoDB
default-storage-engine=InnoDB

(You can also set the storage engine on a per-session or per-table basis.)

Create a new database for COmanage Gears. You can name the new database whatever you like. Set the configuration information, including the password to connect to the database with, in app/config/database.php.

Set up the database schema. You will need permission to write to the tmp directory (set above) to run this command.

$ cd cake/console
$ sudo ./cake schema create
...
The following table(s) will be dropped.
...
Are you sure you want to drop the table(s)? (y/n) 
[n] > n

The following table(s) will be created.
...
Are you sure you want to create the table(s)? (y/n) 
[y] > y
...
End create.

Use cake schema update -s # to update an existing database to schema #.

Initial Configuration

Run the initial configuration script. Be sure to enter the username that will be returned by your web server's authentication engine. For example, under Apache this corresponds to $REMOTE_USER.

$ cd cake/console
$ ./cake setup
Enter administrator's given name  
> Pat
Enter administrator's family name  
> Lee
Enter administrator's login username  
> plee@university.edu