[Koha-devel] Re: installation w\o apache.conf

[Pat Eyler]

On Fri, 25 Jul 2003, Seltzer Water wrote:

>
> Hi I am currently a systems librarian intern
>

Hi there,
I'm answering this here on a couple of lists (please excuse the cross
posting), in the hopes that we can generate some additional
answers/questions/interest/whatever.

>  who has a keen and long-standing interest in programming and am
>
>  currently doing a library internship at IRETA, the northeast addiction
>
>  treatment and training center in Pittsburgh, PA. I am trying to install
>
>  koha for them on a Linux server - www.hostmysite.com. Unfortunately,
>
>  however, the ISP is not going to let me have access to the httpd.conf,
>
>  so I am kind of stuck ...  Could you think of any rhetorical strategies
> which I could use to get them to give me access to this data?  Or would
> this present too great a security breach?
>

Perhaps they will let you keep your own conf file which can be read into
theirs with the Apache Include directive.

Another option might be for you to provide a file to them to review and
manually include in the httpd.conf

A final option might be to let you run a separate apache process on other
ports (say 6080 and 6088) and allow you to manage the httpd.conf for that.

If they're being this concerned about apache, will they give you the MySQL
access you need?

>
>
>  Plus, I had another question about the documentation (which I would
>
>  like to do my part to improve):
>
>
>
>  "if you want to install the Koha configuration file somwhere other than
> /etc (for non-root installations [such as my own - SAM], you should set
>
> etcdir and prefix environment variables) ---"
>
> Where do I set etcdir and where do I prefix the environment variables?

I think this is a case where the doc lags behind the release (one of the
reasons we're doing a pre-release).

a recent copy of the doc says:

   To install Koha without access to superuser/root/sysadmin level
   privileges, ask your system administrator to arrange for a user called
   opac and then set the user in the OPAC virtual host. This will permit
   all of the cgi scripts to be executed as 'user' opac. The Virtualhost
   then may suexec to the user installing Koha, and koha.conf can then
   be written by that user, avoiding the need for the chown command, which
   is restricted to a superuser. It is then extremely important to set
   PERL5LIB environment variable to point at the libraries you have
   installed:

   SetEnv PERL5LIB /some/path/to/modules

and can be found here:
http://www.kohalabs.com/kohadoc/book1.html

>
> Are there any ways around having to restart Apache and have access to it?

unfortunately, there aren't any good ones that I know of.

-pate

>
>
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