How to Install Koha 3.0.0 on MacOS X 10.5

This is a pretty technical note, which I’m posting here for review and hopefully to help other people. The reinstall I mentioned last week was a MacOS X 10.5 server, so this time I installed Koha more simply and took more notes. I don’t want to put this in the distribution as INSTALL.osx, for reasons mentioned below. Also, I’d be very happy if people replaced all osx servers with debian ones, or at least some sort of tidy GNU/Linux.

The sysadmin installed XCode and fink for me and I ran

fink install apache2 apache2-dev mysql mysql15-dev

without any great event. I also re-used an old, imperfect, local finkinfo/idzebra.info to

fink install idzebra idzebra-shlibs

Next, I used the extremely horrible command

fink list $(sed -n -e “/PREREQ_PM =/,/}/{;s/^[ ‘]*//;s/::/-/g;s/’.*$/-pm588/;/-.*-pm588/p;}” Makefile.PL | tr A-Z a-z)

inside an unpacked koha-3.00.00.094 folder to find out which modules fink had packaged already. Something similar can be done for debian and ubuntu, using apt-search or dpkg instead of fink and a libperl- prefix instead of a -pm588 suffix. (I think all systems should do something like that. Then we could merge the INSTALL.*s into the main INSTALL because they lag behind.)

Three of those, I copied to /sw/fink/10.5/local/main/finkinfo and edited slightly (usually to increase the version: dbd-mysql-pm, html-template-pm, xml-libxml-common-pm, xml-libxml-pm.info and xml-simple-pm.info… also in my fink-10.5 folder) and then ran

fink install dbd-mysql-pm588 text-iconv-pm588 xml-simple-pm588 data-dumper-pm588 digest-md5-pm588 file-temp-pm588 getopt-long-pm588 html-scrubber-pm588 list-util-pm588 list-moreutils-pm588 mime-base64-pm588 net-ldap-pm588 test-harness-pm588 text-wrap-pm588 time-hires-pm588 unicode-normalize-pm588 xml-dumper-pm588 xml-libxslt-pm588 xml-rss-pm588 yaml-syck-pm588

to install those modules.

For the remaining modules from CPAN, I set PERL5LIB to my new Koha folder (export PERL5LIB=/Library/WebServer/Koha/lib:/Library/WebServer/Koha/System/Library/Perl/5.8.8/:/Library/WebServer/Koha/lib/perl5/site_perl/:$PERL5LIB) and ran perl -MCPAN -e shell, telling the configuration screens to use PREFIX=/Library/WebServer/Koha (so install into the Koha folder instead of splattering across /System/Library). Then the command

install Bundle::KohaSupport

just worked, thanks to excellent work by Mike Mylonas and others.

Finally, all that was left was to run the normal installation in the koha-3.00.00.094 folder, picking the “single” configuration and ignoring “make test” failure (because it’s a work in progress and this is RC1), edit the /Library/WebServer/Koha/etc/zebra/*cfg to point at /sw instead of /usr, symlink koha-httpd.conf into /sw/etc/apache2/sites-available and run the a2ensite commands, copy the service plist files into /Library/LaunchDaemons and load them into launchctl, browse koha and start testing it.

Simple(!)

It only took me a full day of work to figure that out and do the reinstall… compared to under 2 hours from scratch on debian at the moment. Maybe it’s faster if you know the OS better and/or aren’t trying so hard not to splatter stuff across the base system. Did I do anything wrong above?