NaviServer - programmable web server
4.99  5.0

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admin-install(n) 4.99.30 manual "NaviServer Manual"

Name

admin-install - NaviServer Installation Guide

Table Of Contents

Description

NaviServer is distributed in source form.

Getting Started

NaviServer is reasonably portable and known to compile and run on the following platforms:

It's likely NaviServer can compile on other systems and/or higher or lower numbered versions but this has not been extensively tested. The primary development platforms for NaviServer is Linux.

You will need a C compiler. The best one to use is GNU GCC from http://www.gnu.org and its mirrors or clang. NaviServer (and the included Tcl libraries) are written entirely in ANSI standard C.

GNU make is also required. It is available for all major operating systems and also available from the GNU web site. On some platforms (e.g., SunOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD) the GNU make is called gmake.

Downloading

Released versions of NaviServer are available from SourceForge Download area. You find there for every version the main NaviServer source code and as well the naviserver-*modules.tar.gz files matching the main source code files with the same version.

Latest development version of NaviServer and the modules is available from the GitHub NaviServer repository and can be downloaded via:

 git clone https://github.com/naviserver-project/naviserver.git

or for the modules with

 git clone https://github.com/naviserver-project/modulname

Building

We've tried to make building NaviServer as simple as possible. When downloading a release from sourceforge, simply type:

 cd naviserver
 ./configure
 make
 sudo make install

When working with the (unreleased) version from the source code repository, a call of autogen.sh is necessary as well:

 cd naviserver
 ./autogen.sh
 ./configure
 make
 sudo make install
 make install

Note: If you have any problems building, the two files include/Makefile.global and include/Makefile.module have all the information you need to change settings throughout the NaviServer environment.

Two options to configure.sh script worth noting:

  1. --enable-symbols to enable debugging information to be compiled in for easy debugging, otherwise it will be compiled with optimization enabled and that will prevent from effective troubleshooting in case of server crash

Installing

Type "make install" to make a production server. This will create an installation directory at /usr/local/ns/, populate the directories with various startup files and configuration files, copy the binaries to the /usr/local/ns/bin directory, and finish.

Compiling and Installing Modules

Download modules from sourceforge releases or GitHub as described above. Note that you should first install the main NaviServer package before installing the optional modules. Some part of the configuration of the modules is taken from previously installed NaviServer installations. Typically installed at the standard place at /usr/local/ns/. If this is not the case in your installation, please provide the location to make via parameter NAVISERVER.

  make NAVISERVER=PATH_TO_LOCATION install

At this moment the following modules are available:

nsaccess nsclamav nsdbi nsdbmysql nsdhcpd nsicmp nsmemcache nssip nsstats nsvfs nsaspell nsconf nsdbilite nsdbpg nsdns nsimap nsphp nssmtpd nssyslogd nszlib nsauthpam nsconfigrw nsdbimy nsdbsqlite nsexpat nsldapd nsradiusd nssnmp nstftpd nschartdir nsdbbdb nsdbipg nsdbtds nsgdchart nsloopctl nsrtsp nsssl nsoracle nsudp

To check what modules are available go to: https://github.com/orgs/naviserver-project/repositories

Some of the modules have external dependencies such as include directories or paths to libraries, so please look into module's README file for any additional information.

Configuring

The installation directory contains several configuration files under /usr/local/ns/conf installation directory. A simple configuration to start with is nsd-config.tcl, which is used int he examples below. For more details, see NaviServer Configuration Reference.

Note: Modules can be disabled in the sample nsd.tcl for various reasons. Some modules like nscp or nsperm are optional and can be disabled by e.g., commenting out the respective lines in the "ns/server/default/modules" section of the configuration file. Before using them in a production environment, change the passwords and default permissions by following the instructions in the NaviServer documentation.

Although you must be root to start NaviServer on port 80, the server itself must change to a regular user shortly after initialization. You either need to start the server as a non-root user (in which case you will not be able to listen for connections on privileged ports such as port 80) or you must include a -u user command line flag to which the server will setuid(2) after startup. We assume in the following sections that a user nsadmin and a group nsadmin were already created on the system, where NaviServer is installed.

If NaviServer was installed with default nsd.tcl configuration file, just type

  /usr/local/ns/bin/nsd

and it will be started in the background listening on port 8080.

You may either specify a Unix username or numeric uid, e.g.:

  bin/nsd -t conf/nsd-config.tcl -u nsadmin

For the mode of operation, there are four choices: Foreground, Background, Background with watchdog and Inittab.

Note: While running NaviServer on some Unix platforms (e.g., Linux, SGI), you'll notice multiple nsd processes. This is normal and represents the individual threads. The main process id can be determined by checking the log/nsd.pid file or looking at the last few entries of the server log (per default "logs/error.log", each of which will include the process id and thread id in the form [pid.tid]. You can also telnet to the control port and type "ns_info pid".

See Also

admin-maintenance

Keywords

command-line-options, nscp, nsd, nssock, nsssl