Installation with XAMPP 1.4.12

1. Introduction

Using XAMPP avoids a time consuming installation that requires manually compilation of all libraries and modules that are needed for running ILIAS 3.x and 4.x. The XAMPP package is an easy way of installing PERL, PHP, PEAR, APACHE and MYSQL. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use: just download, extract and start.

2. Preliminaries

Download the tar.gz package from the homepage of XAMPP project at [1]. There are releases for Windows, Linux, MacOS X and Solaris.

[1] http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html

This procedure has been tested under Ubuntu Linux Hoary. If you try it with another systems, please let us know how it ran.

3. Installation Procedure

a) Once you have your latest package of XAMPP, just extract it to /opt/lampp as root:

    root~# cd /opt
    root~# tar xvfz $foo/xampp-linux-1.4.12.tar.gz

where $foo is where you downloaded the package.

b) Now that you have it extracted, two options are possible: either you stop your running mysql and apache services, that are usually located at port 80 and 3306, or you can change it in the correct configuration files at /opt/lampp/etc.

b.1) Stop the services, commonly with the commands:

    root~# /etc/init.d/apache2 stop
    root~# /etc/init.d/mysql stop

c) Once you has your 80 and 3306 port free, you can launch xampp services with:

    root~# /opt/lampp/lamp start

Notice that with this command, mysql 4.1 and PHP 5 are booted by default!

d) Now you can simply extract your ilias latest package to /opt/lampp/htdocs:

    root~# cd /opt/lampp/htdocs
    root~# tar xvfz $foo/ilias-4.0.10.tar.gz

where $foo is the location or your downloaded package.Then please change the permissions of  the created folder to nobody:root with:

    root~# chown -R nobody:root /opt/lampp/htdocs/ilias

and finally create the data directory outside the web directory for next ilias setup:

       root~# mkdir /opt/lampp/data
    root~# chown -R nobody:root /opt/lampp/data

e) Is the moment to launch your browser and set it to open the URL:

    http://localhost/

Here you find a screen with XAMPP setup. Firstly you can change your language, and then try clicking in "status" at the left side menu. You should watch something like this:

This is enough to run ILIAS. However, the performance will surely improve if you get "eAccelerator" extension running. For doing this, you must uncomment the right section by editing the php config file:

    root~# vi /opt/lampp/etc/php.ini
or
       root~# emacs /opt/lampp/etc/php.ini

search then for string "eaccelerator" and uncomment all the lines starting with it, by deleting the ';' character from the beginning of the line.

Before closing the file,get the chance to change common values needed in php.ini as "post_max_size", "memory_limit" or "max_execution_time". The needed parameters to be changed are commented in detail in the ILIAS INSTALL documentation.

f) Then restart the xampp service:

    root~# /opt/lampp/lamp restart

g) Due to third-party software needed by ILIAS (imagemagick convert, zip, unzip, htmldoc, java, etc...) be sure that you have them installed in a location as /usr/local/bin or whatever, so that you can go to next step without problems:

h) Now you can launch your browser again and follow common ILIAS web-based procedure for installation, at:

    http://localhost/ilias/setup/setup.php

i) You should now be able to launch ILIAS as always.

Further comments to Arturo González at arturogf@ugr.es