These instructions provide a recipe for building your own all-in-one Avalon system from scratch on CentOS or Red Hat Enterprise Linux, version 6.x is supported, 7.x will be supported soon.  Please note that while an all-in-one installation as outlined here is certainly suitable for testing and demos,  a single, all-in-one, server may not be suitable for production environments.

Ready the Installation Environment

Make sure a valid hostname is resolvable

The default hostname is “avalon.dev”, so name the machine this and enter it into /etc/hosts

# hostname
avalon.dev
# cat /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1   localhost localhost.localdomain localhost4 localhost4.localdomain4 avalon.dev

...

The Avalon Media System requires several ports to be open to client browsers.

Here are the port settings that will need to be configured:

...

The preferred method is to create a shell script that will do the work for you. Here is an example script that you should look through and customize as needed: avalon-iptables-config.sh

Save your script to /etc/sysconfig/avalon-iptables-config.sh, make it executable and run it.

chmod +x /etc/sysconfig/avalon-iptables-config.sh
/etc/sysconfig/avalon-iptables-config.sh

If you run into connection issues you can disable the iptables, by running "service iptables stop". This will completely drop your firewall. When finished troubleshooting run "service iptables start".

Disable SELinux

vim /etc/selinux/config #change the value of `SELINUX` from `enforcing` to `permissive`

vim /etc/selinux/config #change the value of `SELINUX` to `disabled`

Install EPEL

This package has libyaml-devel which is required by ruby and not provided by Redhat.

yum install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm

Install development libraries and packages for building Ruby

yum groupinstall "Development Tools"
yum install readline-devel zlib-devel libyaml-devel libffi-devel openssl-devel libxml2-devel libxslt-devel cmake

Install Java 8

yum install java-1.8.0-openjdk

Main Components

Fedora Commons Repository

Tomcat

Fedora runs as a webapp in Tomcat

Install Apache Tomcat 

yum install tomcat
vim /etc/tomcat/server.xml #line 71, change the Tomcat connector port from 8080 to 8984

Add Tomcat manager user

By default, no user has access to the Tomcat Manager App. Define a user in /etc/tomcat/tomcat-users.xml with access to the manager-gui role. Below is a very basic example.

<tomcat-users>
  <role rolename="manager-gui"/>
  <user username="admin" password="<insert strong password here>" roles="manager-gui"/>
</tomcat-users>

Configure Tomcat for Fedora

Append the following to /etc/sysconfig/tomcat

JAVA_OPTS="${JAVA_OPTS} -Dfcrepo.modeshape.configuration=classpath:/config/file-simple/repository.json -Dfcrepo.home=/var/avalon/fedora/"

Restart Tomcat

service tomcat restart

Download and run the fcrepo installer

mkdir -p /var/avalon/fedora
chown tomcat:tomcat /var/avalon/fedora
wget https://github.com/fcrepo4/fcrepo4/releases/download/fcrepo-4.7.3/fcrepo-webapp-4.7.3.war -O /usr/share/tomcat/webapps/fedora4.war

See if you can access Fedora's REST interface at http://<server host name>:8984/fedora4/rest

Try it out on your local machine and on another machine. If you can't reach the app from another machine, your iptables might need to be changed to allow access. If Fedora is not up, check the tomcat logs in /var/log/tomcat/. Catalina.out and localhost.<date>.log usually provide the best information.

Solr

Avalon makes use of Solr through the Blacklight gem for faceting and relevance-based searching.

Install prerequisites

yum install lsof

Download the solr tarball and run the installation script

Download Solr from http://archive.apache.org/dist/lucene/solr/

wget http://archive.apache.org/dist/lucene/solr/6.4.2/solr-6.4.2.tgz
tar xzf solr-6.4.2.tgz solr-6.4.2/bin/install_solr_service.sh --strip-components=2
bash ./install_solr_service.sh solr-6.4.2.tgz

By default, the script extracts the distribution archive into /opt, configures Solr to write files into /var/solr, and runs Solr as the solr user. Follow the linked guide if you wish to change these defaults.

Create Avalon core for Solr

mkdir -p /tmp/avalon_solr/
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/avalonmediasystem/avalon/master/solr/config/solrconfig.xml -O /tmp/avalon_solr/solrconfig.xml
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/avalonmediasystem/avalon/master/solr/config/schema.xml -O /tmp/avalon_solr/schema.xml
su solr # Needs to run as solr user
/opt/solr/bin/solr create_core -c avalon -d /tmp/avalon_solr
exit

If you have successfully installed Solr you should be able to access the dashboard page at http://<server host name>:8983/solr

Instructions on how to manually start/stop Solr: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/solr/Running+Solr

MySQL

Avalon uses MySQL for storing search queries, user data and roles, and as a back end our encoding dashboard. 

Install MySQL server 

yum install mysql-server
service mysqld start

Create databases and users

Enter the mysql monitor

#mysql
Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g.
...etc...
mysql>

Create a database for the Avalon web application and add a user to it

create database rails;
create user 'rails'@'localhost' identified by 'rails';
grant all privileges on rails.* to 'rails'@'localhost';
flush privileges;

Check your work and exit

mysql> show databases;
+--------------------+
| Database           |
+--------------------+
| information_schema |
| mysql              |
| rails              |
| test               |
+--------------------+
5 rows in set (0.00 sec)
mysql> select user, host from mysql.user;
+--------+--------------+
| user   | host         |
+--------+--------------+
| root   | 127.0.0.1    |
|        | 129.79.32.87 |
| root   | 129.79.32.87 |
|        | localhost    |
| rails  | localhost    |
| root   | localhost    |
+--------+--------------+
7 rows in set (0.00 sec)
 
mysql> exit;
Bye

See documentation for your version of MySQL Server for detailed syntax (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/create-database.html )

Media Streaming Server

An HLS-enabled server like Wowza, Adobe Media Server (commercial) or Nginx + the HLS module (open-source) can take an mp4 created from distribute-streaming and stream it on the fly.

Nginx instructions

rpm -ihv http://installrepo.kaltura.org/releases/kaltura-release.noarch.rpm
yum install kaltura-nginx

Add /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

user nginx;
worker_processes 4;

events {
  worker_connections 1024;
}

http {
  server {
    listen 8980;

    vod_mode local;
    vod_last_modified 'Sun, 19 Nov 2000 08:52:00 GMT';
    vod_last_modified_types *;
    vod_metadata_cache metadata_cache 512m;
    vod_response_cache response_cache 128m;
    gzip on;
    gzip_types application/vnd.apple.mpegurl;
    open_file_cache          max=1000 inactive=5m;
    open_file_cache_valid    2m;
    open_file_cache_min_uses 1;
    open_file_cache_errors   on;

    location ~ ^/avalon/(?<stream>.+)/(?<resource>.+\.(?:m3u8|ts)) {
      alias /var/avalon/derivatives/$stream;
      vod hls;

      set $token "$arg_token";
      add_header X-Stream-Auth-Token "$token";
      
      sub_filter_types application/vnd.apple.mpegurl;
      sub_filter_once off;
      sub_filter '.ts' ".ts?token=$token";

      auth_request /auth;
      add_header Access-Control-Allow-Headers '*';
      add_header Access-Control-Expose-Headers 'Server,range,Content-Length,Content-Range';
      add_header Access-Control-Allow-Methods 'GET, HEAD, OPTIONS';
      add_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin '*';
      expires 100d;
    }

    location = /auth {
      # resolver 127.0.0.1;
      proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1/authorize.txt?token=$token&name=$stream;
      proxy_pass_request_body off;
      proxy_set_header Content-Length "";
      proxy_set_header X-Original-URI $request_uri;
    }
  }
}

Add /etc/init.d/nginx. For RHEL7 use this script.

#!/bin/sh
#
# nginx - this script starts and stops the nginx daemon
#
# chkconfig:   - 85 15
# description:  NGINX is an HTTP(S) server, HTTP(S) reverse \
#               proxy and IMAP/POP3 proxy server
# processname: nginx
# config:      /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
# config:      /etc/sysconfig/nginx
# pidfile:     /var/run/nginx.pid

# Source function library.
. /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions

# Source networking configuration.
. /etc/sysconfig/network

# Check that networking is up.
[ "$NETWORKING" = "no" ] && exit 0

nginx="/usr/sbin/nginx"
prog=$(basename $nginx)

NGINX_CONF_FILE="/etc/nginx/nginx.conf"

[ -f /etc/sysconfig/nginx ] && . /etc/sysconfig/nginx

lockfile=/var/lock/subsys/nginx

make_dirs() {
   # make required directories
   user=`$nginx -V 2>&1 | grep "configure arguments:.*--user=" | sed 's/[^*]*--user=\([^ ]*\).*/\1/g' -`
   if [ -n "$user" ]; then
      if [ -z "`grep $user /etc/passwd`" ]; then
         useradd -M -s /bin/nologin $user
      fi
      options=`$nginx -V 2>&1 | grep 'configure arguments:'`
      for opt in $options; do
          if [ `echo $opt | grep '.*-temp-path'` ]; then
              value=`echo $opt | cut -d "=" -f 2`
              if [ ! -d "$value" ]; then
                  # echo "creating" $value
                  mkdir -p $value && chown -R $user $value
              fi
          fi
       done
    fi
}

start() {
    [ -x $nginx ] || exit 5
    [ -f $NGINX_CONF_FILE ] || exit 6
    make_dirs
    echo -n $"Starting $prog: "
    daemon $nginx -c $NGINX_CONF_FILE
    retval=$?
    echo
    [ $retval -eq 0 ] && touch $lockfile
    return $retval
}

stop() {
    echo -n $"Stopping $prog: "
    killproc $prog -QUIT
    retval=$?
    echo
    [ $retval -eq 0 ] && rm -f $lockfile
    return $retval
}

restart() {
    configtest || return $?
    stop
    sleep 1
    start
}

reload() {
    configtest || return $?
    echo -n $"Reloading $prog: "
    killproc $nginx -HUP
    RETVAL=$?
    echo
}

force_reload() {
    restart
}

configtest() {
  $nginx -t -c $NGINX_CONF_FILE
}

rh_status() {
    status $prog
}

rh_status_q() {
    rh_status >/dev/null 2>&1
}

case "$1" in
    start)
        rh_status_q && exit 0
        $1
        ;;
    stop)
        rh_status_q || exit 0
        $1
        ;;
    restart|configtest)
        $1
        ;;
    reload)
        rh_status_q || exit 7
        $1
        ;;
    force-reload)
        force_reload
        ;;
    status)
        rh_status
        ;;
    condrestart|try-restart)
        rh_status_q || exit 0
            ;;
    *)
        echo $"Usage: $0 {start|stop|status|restart|condrestart|try-restart|reload|force-reload|configtest}"
        exit 2
esac

Add nginx user and let it own nginx stuff

useradd -M -s /bin/nologin nginx
chown -R nginx:nginx /etc/nginx /var/log/nginx 

Start nginx

chmod +x /etc/init.d/nginx
service nginx start

Avalon config should be updated to be compatible with Nginx:

streaming:
  server: :nginx
  http_base: 'http://localhost:8980/avalon'
  content_path: '/var/avalon/derivatives'

FFmpeg

Installation prerequisites

Install prerequisite packages using yum and the Avalon repository (note: mediainfo is pinned to 0.7.61-1 because of a bug with time fragment formatting in most recent version 0.7.87-1 in epel):

yum install SDL-devel a52dec-devel bzip2-devel faad2-devel freetype-devel frei0r-plugins-devel \
	gsm-devel imlib2-devel lame-devel libdc1394-devel libraw1394-devel librtmp-devel libtheora-devel \
	libva-devel libfaac-devel libvdpau-devel libstdc++-devel libvorbis-devel libvpx-devel \
	mediainfo-0.7.61-1 opencore-amr-devel opencv-devel openjpeg-devel openssl-devel schroedinger-devel \
	speex-devel texi2html vo-aacenc-devel x264-devel xvidcore-devel yasm zlib-devel

Install rpmdev-setuptree

yum install rpmdevtools

Install ffmpeg srpm

The following commands need to run under a user other than root. Change to another user to continue.

su - someuser

Run the ffmpeg installer

rpmdev-setuptree
rpm -ivh https://github.com/avalonmediasystem/avalon-installer/blob/master/files/ffmpeg/ffmpeg-2.4.2-1.el6.src.rpm?raw=true

# Retrieving https://github.com/avalonmediasystem/avalon-installer/blob/master/files/ffmpeg/ffmpeg-2.4.2-1.el6.src.rpm
#   1:ffmpeg                 warning: user makerpm does not exist - using root
# warning: group makerpm does not exist - using root
########################################### [100%]
# warning: user makerpm does not exist - using root
# warning: group makerpm does not exist - using root
# Build ffmpeg binary as non-root and install as root

rpmbuild -bb rpmbuild/SPECS/ffmpeg24.spec

Log back in as root and finish the install.

su - root
rpm -ivh /home/someuser/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/ffmpeg-*.rpm

You can also build a more modern ffmpeg from source, but not all versions work. Version 3.1 is known to work - check out the release/3.1 branch and build from there. If your modern ffmpeg uses fdk_aac instead of libfaac, adjust Avalon config/ffmpeg_presets.xml accordingly.

HTTPD

Install and start the httpd service.

yum install httpd
service httpd start

With newer httpd you may need to in /etc/httpd/conf.d/10-mod_rewrite.conf, replace RewriteLock line with Mutex sem

Apache Passenger and Ruby

Change current user to avalon then install RVM and ruby 2.4.1

su - root
yum install sqlite-devel
su - avalon
curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --ruby=2.4.1

Source the RVM shell (as avalon user) or close the terminal and open it back up.

source /home/avalon/.rvm/scripts/rvm
rvm use 2.4.1

Install Passenger via Gem (as avalon user)

gem install passenger

Check to make sure passenger installed in the expected location (as avalon user)

$ passenger-config --root
/home/avalon/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.4.1/gems/passenger-5.0.17

Install Passenger apache module requirements (as root)

su - root
yum install curl-devel httpd httpd-devel apr-devel apr-util-devel

Build passenger for your version of Apache and Ruby (as avalon user)

su - avalon
passenger-install-apache2-module #copy the suggested Apache configuration file settings for later

Create an apache configuration file (as root)

su - root
vim /etc/httpd/conf.d/passenger.conf

Example contents of /etc/httpd/conf.d/passenger.conf, which may need to be changed based off of the current version of ruby and passenger:

LoadModule passenger_module /home/avalon/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.4.1/gems/passenger-5.0.17/buildout/apache2/mod_passenger.so
<IfModule passenger_module>
  PassengerRoot /home/avalon/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.4.1/gems/passenger-5.0.17
  PassengerDefaultRuby /home/avalon/.rvm/wrappers/ruby-2.4.1/ruby
  PassengerMaxPoolSize 30
  PassengerPoolIdleTime 300
  PassengerMaxInstancesPerApp 0
  PassengerMinInstances 3
  PassengerSpawnMethod smart-lv2
</IfModule>

Apache security configuration

wget --no-check-certificate https://raw.github.com/avalonmediasystem/config-files/master/sbin/avalon_auth -O /usr/local/sbin/avalon_auth
chmod +x /usr/local/sbin/avalon_auth
wget --no-check-certificate https://raw.github.com/avalonmediasystem/config-files/master/apache/10-mod_rewrite.conf -P /etc/httpd/conf.d/

Create a virtual host for avalon in /etc/httpd/conf.d/avalon.conf

wget --no-check-certificate https://raw.github.com/avalonmediasystem/config-files/master/apache/20-avalon.conf -P /etc/httpd/conf.d/
vim /etc/httpd/conf.d/20-avalon.conf

In 20-avalon.conf add this line inside the VirtualHost tag:

RailsEnv development

If using SSL, the following fix should be added to address BEAST, POODLE, RC4 issues (after the SSLEngine on)

SSLProtocol all -SSLv2 -SSLv3
SSLCipherSuite ALL:!ADH:!EXPORT:!SSLv2:!RC4:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:-LOW

Restart apache.  With apache running, check passenger-status

service httpd restart
su - avalon
which passenger-status
#> ~/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.4.1/bin/passenger-status

Avalon

Grab Avalon code from github

cd ~
git clone git://github.com/avalonmediasystem/avalon.git
cd avalon
git checkout master #make sure you are in the master branch (should be by default)
su - root
chown avalon:avalon /var/www/avalon/public/
su - avalon
mv public/* /var/www/avalon/public/
rmdir public
mv  * /var/www/avalon/

Configure Avalon 

As of 6.3, Avalon is using the flexible and increasingly popular Config gem. Default settings for Avalon now live at config/settings.yml, which should not be altered. Any custom config should be placed in config/settings/<environment>.local.yml which will selectively override the default values.

Properly formatted environment variables can also override Avalon settings. For example, SETTINGS__REDIS__HOST will override

...

redis:
  host:

A list of config values can be found at Configuration Files#config/settings.yml

Create /var/www/avalon/config/setup_load_paths.rb and add:

if ENV['MY_RUBY_HOME'] && ENV['MY_RUBY_HOME'].include?('rvm')
   begin
     gems_path = ENV['MY_RUBY_HOME'].split(/@/)[0].sub(/rubies/,'gems')
     ENV['GEM_PATH'] = "#{gems_path}:#{gems_path}@global"
     require 'rvm'
     RVM.use_from_path! File.dirname(File.dirname(__FILE__))
   rescue LoadError
     raise "RVM gem is currently unavailable."
   end
 end
 # If you're not using Bundler at all, remove lines bellow
 ENV['BUNDLE_GEMFILE'] = File.expand_path('../Gemfile', File.dirname(__FILE__))
 require 'bundler/setup'

...

cd /var/www/avalon/config
vim database.yml

Replace database.yml with the correct values for your production environment

development:
  adapter: mysql2
  host: localhost
  database: rails
  username: rails
  password: rails
  pool: 5
  timeout: 5000

Install the mysql2 adapter 

yum install cmake #<--will be required for rugged gem
yum install mariadb-devel
su - avalon
gem install activerecord-mysql2-adapter
gem install mysql2
vim /var/www/avalon/Gemfile

Run the bundle install

# as root
yum install nodejs # Javascript runtime 

# as avalon
cd /var/www/avalon
gem update debugger-ruby_core_source
gem install bundler
bundle install --with mysql

Finish configuring Avalon

Edit /var/www/avalon/config/solr.yml and /var/www/avalon/config/blacklight.yml

  development:
    url: http://localhost:8983/solr/avalon

Edit /var/www/avalon/config/fedora.yml

  development:
    user: fedoraAdmin
    password: fedoraPassword
    url: http://127.0.0.1:8984/fedora4/rest
    base_path: ""

Let Avalon know where your HLS streams are

streaming:
  content_path: '/var/avalon/derivatives'

...

cd /var/www/avalon
rake secret

 grab the output of rake secret and add it to secrets.yml where instructed.

More information: Configuration Files#config/secrets.yml

Create controlled_vocabulary.yml

cp controlled_vocabulary.yml.example controlled_vocabulary.yml

Create the database using rake

# as avalon user
cd /var/www/avalon
rake db:create

If you get an error message saying that you can't connect to the database, take a look at this post and follow some of the troubleshooting steps.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5376427/cant-connect-to-local-mysql-server-through-socket-var-mysql-mysql-sock-38

Run the database migrations

rake db:migrate

Set rails environment to development, if it has not defaulted to this. On the first line of /var/www/avalon/config/environment.rb make sure it says 'development'

ENV['RAILS_ENV'] ||= 'development'

Sidekiq

Avalon uses Sidekiq for background processing, which relies on Redis as its key-value store.

Install Redis

yum install redis

Start Resque

# as avalon (replace production with development if necessary)
cd /var/www/avalon/
RAILS_ENV=production sidekiq -d -C config/sidekiq.yml

Sidekiq logs to log/sidekiq.log in the avalon directory. 

For RHEL 7, running sidekiq as a systemd service is preferrable: https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq/blob/master/examples/systemd/sidekiq.service

Additional Configurations

Dropbox

groupadd -r dropbox
useradd -r avalondrop
usermod -G dropbox avalon
mkdir -p /srv/avalon/dropbox
chown avalondrop:dropbox /srv/avalon/dropbox
chmod 2775 /srv/avalon/dropbox

Edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config

# override default of no subsystems
Subsystem sftp internal-sftp
 
# Example of overriding settings on a per-user basis
#Match User anoncvs
# X11Forwarding no
# AllowTcpForwarding no
# ForceCommand cvs server
Match Group dropbox
ChrootDirectory /srv/avalon
X11Forwarding no
AllowTcpForwarding no
ForceCommand internal-sftp

Restart SSH

service sshd restart

Batch ingest

To manually start a batch ingest job, run as avalon user

rake avalon:batch:ingest

To make batch ingest run automatically whenever a manifest is present, you need to add a cron job. This cron job can be created by the whenever gem from reading config/schedule.rb. To preview, run

whenever

this will translate content in schedule.rb to cron job syntax. Once verified, run the following to write job to crontab

whenever --update-crontab

You should get the cron job automatically if you were deploying from Capistrano.These instructions provide a recipe for building your own all-in-one Avalon system from scratch on CentOS or Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 7.x.  Please note that while an all-in-one, single machine installation as outlined here is certainly suitable for testing and demos, production environments are typically implemented across multiple servers running the main components of the application.

Ready the Installation Environment

Storage requirement

Avalon and components need about 20GB of disk space to install.

Open ports requirement

The Avalon Media System requires several ports to be open to client browsers.

Here are the port settings that will need to be configured:

The preferred method is to create a shell script that will do the work for you. Here is an example script that you should look through and customize as needed: avalon-iptables-config.sh

Save your script to /etc/sysconfig/avalon-iptables-config.sh, make it executable and run it.

chmod +x /etc/sysconfig/avalon-iptables-config.sh
/etc/sysconfig/avalon-iptables-config.sh

If you run into connection issues you can disable the iptables, by running "service iptables stop". This will completely drop your firewall. When finished troubleshooting run "service iptables start".

Disable SELinux

vim /etc/selinux/config #change the value of `SELINUX` from `enforcing` to `permissive`

You may have to disable SELinux completely if there's Passenger installation problem

vim /etc/selinux/config #change the value of `SELINUX` to `disabled`

Reboot to apply change

shutdown -r now

Install EPEL

This package has libyaml-devel which is required by ruby and not provided by Redhat.

yum install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm

Install development libraries and packages for building Ruby

yum groupinstall "Development Tools"
yum install readline-devel zlib-devel libyaml-devel libffi-devel openssl-devel libxml2-devel libxslt-devel cmake

Install Java 8

yum install java-1.8.0-openjdk

Main Components

MariaDB

Avalon uses MariaDB for storing search queries, user data and roles, and as a back end our encoding dashboard. 

Install MariaDB server 

yum install mariadb-server
systemctl start mariadb

Fedora Commons Repository

Tomcat

Fedora runs as a webapp in Tomcat

Install Apache Tomcat 

yum install tomcat
vim /etc/tomcat/server.xml #line 71, change the Tomcat connector port from 8080 to 8984

Add Tomcat manager user

By default, no user has access to the Tomcat Manager App. Define a user in /etc/tomcat/tomcat-users.xml with access to the manager-gui role. Below is a very basic example.

<tomcat-users>
  <role rolename="manager-gui"/>
  <user username="admin" password="<insert strong password here>" roles="manager-gui"/>
</tomcat-users>

Create Fedora user and database

Enter the mariadb client

mysql
mariadb> create database fcrepo CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
mariadb> create user 'fcrepo'@'localhost' identified by '<fcrepo_password>';
mariadb> grant all privileges on fcrepo.* to 'fcrepo'@'localhost';

mariadb> create database rails CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
mariadb> create user 'rails'@'localhost' identified by '<rails_pasword>';
mariadb> grant all privileges on rails.* to 'rails'@'localhost';

mariadb> flush privileges;

Check your work and exit

mariadb> show databases;
+--------------------+
| Database           |
+--------------------+
| information_schema |
| mysql              |
| fcrepo             |
| performance_schema |
| test               |
+--------------------+
5 rows in set (0.00 sec)
mariadb> exit;
Bye

Configure Tomcat for Fedora

Append the following to /etc/tomcat/tomcat.conf

JAVA_OPTS="-Dfcrepo.modeshape.configuration=classpath:/config/jdbc-mysql/repository.json -Dfcrepo.mysql.username=fcrepo -Dfcrepo.mysql.password=<fcrepo_password> -Dfcrepo.mysql.host=localhost -Dfcrepo.mysql.port=3306 -Dfcrepo.home=/var/avalon/fedora/"

Download and run the fcrepo installer

mkdir -p /var/avalon/fedora
chown tomcat:tomcat /var/avalon/fedora
wget https://github.com/fcrepo4/fcrepo4/releases/download/fcrepo-4.7.5/fcrepo-webapp-4.7.5.war -O /usr/share/tomcat/webapps/fedora4.war

Restart Tomcat

systemctl restart tomcat

See if you can access Fedora's REST interface at http://<server host name>:8984/fedora4/rest

Try it out on your local machine and on another machine. If you can't reach the app from another machine, your 1957955315 might need to be changed to allow access. If Fedora is not up, check the tomcat logs in /var/log/tomcat/. Catalina.out and localhost.<date>.log usually provide the best information.

Solr

Avalon makes use of Solr through the Blacklight gem for faceting and relevance-based searching.

Install prerequisites

yum install lsof

Download the solr tarball and run the installation script

Download Solr from http://archive.apache.org/dist/lucene/solr/

wget http://archive.apache.org/dist/lucene/solr/6.6.6/solr-6.6.6.tgz
tar xzf solr-6.6.6.tgz solr-6.6.6/bin/install_solr_service.sh --strip-components=2
bash ./install_solr_service.sh solr-6.6.6.tgz

By default, the script extracts the distribution archive into /opt, configures Solr to write files into /var/solr, and runs Solr as the solr user. Follow the linked guide if you wish to change these defaults.

Create Avalon core for Solr

mkdir -p /tmp/avalon_solr/
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/avalonmediasystem/avalon/main/solr/config/solrconfig.xml -O /tmp/avalon_solr/solrconfig.xml
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/avalonmediasystem/avalon/main/solr/config/schema.xml -O /tmp/avalon_solr/schema.xml
su solr # Needs to run as solr user
/opt/solr/bin/solr create_core -c avalon -d /tmp/avalon_solr
exit

If you have successfully installed Solr you should be able to access the dashboard page at http://<server host name>:8983/solr

Instructions on how to manually start/stop Solr: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/solr/Running+Solr

Media Streaming Server

An HLS-enabled server like Wowza, Adobe Media Server (commercial) or Nginx + the HLS module (open-source) can take an mp4 created by Avalon and stream it on the fly.

Nginx instructions

rpm -ihv http://installrepo.kaltura.org/releases/kaltura-release.noarch.rpm
yum install kaltura-nginx

Add /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

user nginx;
worker_processes 4;

events {
  worker_connections 1024;
}

http {
  server {
    listen 8980;

    vod_mode local;
    vod_last_modified 'Sun, 19 Nov 2000 08:52:00 GMT';
    vod_last_modified_types *;
    vod_metadata_cache metadata_cache 512m;
    vod_response_cache response_cache 128m;
    gzip on;
    gzip_types application/vnd.apple.mpegurl;
    open_file_cache          max=1000 inactive=5m;
    open_file_cache_valid    2m;
    open_file_cache_min_uses 1;
    open_file_cache_errors   on;

    location ~ ^/avalon/(?<stream>.+)/(?<resource>.+\.(?:m3u8|ts)) {
      alias /var/avalon/derivatives/$stream;
      vod hls;

      set $token "$arg_token";
      add_header X-Stream-Auth-Token "$token";
      
      sub_filter_types application/vnd.apple.mpegurl;
      sub_filter_once off;
      sub_filter '.ts' ".ts?token=$token";

      auth_request /auth;
      add_header Access-Control-Allow-Headers '*';
      add_header Access-Control-Expose-Headers 'Server,range,Content-Length,Content-Range';
      add_header Access-Control-Allow-Methods 'GET, HEAD, OPTIONS';
      add_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin '*';
      expires 100d;
    }

    location = /auth {
      # resolver 127.0.0.1;
      proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1/authorize.txt?token=$token&name=$stream;
      proxy_pass_request_body off;
      proxy_set_header Content-Length "";
      proxy_set_header X-Original-URI $request_uri;
    }
  }
}

Add /lib/systemd/system/nginx.service

[Unit]
Description=The NGINX HTTP and reverse proxy server
After=syslog.target network.target remote-fs.target nss-lookup.target

[Service]
Type=forking
PIDFile=/run/nginx.pid
ExecStartPre=/usr/sbin/nginx -t
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/nginx
ExecReload=/usr/sbin/nginx -s reload
ExecStop=/bin/kill -s QUIT $MAINPID
PrivateTmp=true

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Add nginx user and let it own nginx stuff

useradd -M -s /bin/nologin nginx
chown -R nginx:nginx /etc/nginx /var/log/nginx 

Make 8980 bindable and start nginx

semanage port -a -t http_port_t  -p tcp 8980
systemctl start nginx

Later: Avalon config should be updated to be compatible with Nginx:

streaming:
  server: :nginx
  http_base: 'http://localhost:8980/avalon'
  content_path: '/var/avalon/derivatives'

FFmpeg & Mediainfo

Download and install ffmpeg (for transcoding & thumbnails)

mkdir -p /tmp/ffmpeg && cd /tmp/ffmpeg
curl https://johnvansickle.com/ffmpeg/releases/ffmpeg-release-amd64-static.tar.xz | tar xJ
cp `find . -type f -executable` /usr/bin/

Install Mediainfo (for technical metadata)

yum install mediainfo

HTTPD

Install and start the httpd service.

yum install httpd
systemctl start httpd

Apache Passenger and Ruby

Change current user to avalon then install RVM and ruby 2.4.1

yum install ruby sqlite-devel # Needed to build Ruby using RVM.
useradd avalon
su - avalon
curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --ruby=2.5.5

Source the RVM shell (as avalon user) or close the terminal and open it back up.

source /home/avalon/.rvm/scripts/rvm
rvm use 2.5.5
exit

Install Passenger apache module requirements (as root)

yum install pygpgme curl
curl --fail -sSLo /etc/yum.repos.d/passenger.repo https://oss-binaries.phusionpassenger.com/yum/definitions/el-passenger.repo

yum install mod_passenger || yum-config-manager --enable cr && yum install mod_passenger

Create a virtual host for avalon

wget --no-check-certificate https://raw.github.com/avalonmediasystem/config-files/main/apache/20-avalon.conf -P /etc/httpd/conf.d/
vim /etc/httpd/conf.d/20-avalon.conf

In 20-avalon.conf add this line inside the VirtualHost tag:

RailsEnv production

If using SSL, the following fix should be added to address BEAST, POODLE, RC4 issues (after the SSLEngine on)

SSLProtocol all -SSLv2 -SSLv3
SSLCipherSuite ALL:!ADH:!EXPORT:!SSLv2:!RC4:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:-LOW

Modify /etc/httpd/conf.d/passenger.conf

PassengerRuby /home/avalon/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.5.5/bin/ruby

Validate passenger install and restart apache

passenger-config validate-install
systemctl start httpd

Avalon

Grab Avalon code from github

git clone https://github.com/avalonmediasystem/avalon.git /var/www/avalon
chown -R avalon:avalon /var/www/avalon

Set rails environment to production, if it has not defaulted to this. On the first line of /var/www/avalon/config/environment.rb make sure it says 'production'

ENV['RAILS_ENV'] ||= 'production'

Configure database settings

Anchor
mysql2 mysql2

cd /var/www/avalon/config
vim database.yml

Replace database.yml with the correct values for your production environment. Note that the pool setting should be equal or exceed the number of concurrent jobs in Sidekiq.

production:
  adapter: mysql2
  host: localhost
  database: rails
  username: rails
  password: rails
  pool: 20
  timeout: 5000

Install the mysql2 adapter 

yum install cmake #<--will be required for rugged gem
yum install mariadb-devel

Install gems

Run the bundle install

# as root
yum install nodejs # Javascript runtime 

# as avalon
su - avalon
cd /var/www/avalon
gem install bundler
bundle install --with mysql production --without development test
exit

Finish configuring Avalon

Edit /var/www/avalon/config/solr.yml and /var/www/avalon/config/blacklight.yml

  production:
    url: http://localhost:8983/solr/avalon

Edit /var/www/avalon/config/fedora.yml

production:
    user: fedoraAdmin
    password: fedoraAdmin
    url: http://127.0.0.1:8984/fedora4/rest
    base_path: ""

Create streaming directory

# as root
mkdir -p /var/avalon/derivatives
chown avalon:avalon /var/avalon/derivatives

Let Avalon know where your HLS streams are

streaming:
  server: :nginx
  http_base: 'http://localhost:8980/avalon'
  content_path: '/var/avalon/derivatives'

export RAILS_ENV=production
rake secret

grab the output of rake secret and add it to secrets.yml where instruSTDOUTSTDOUTSTDOUTcted.

More information: Configuration Files#config/secrets.yml

Create controlled_vocabulary.yml

cp config/controlled_vocabulary.yml.example config/controlled_vocabulary.yml

If you get an error message saying that you can't connect to the database, take a look at this post and follow some of the troubleshooting steps.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5376427/cant-connect-to-local-mysql-server-through-socket-var-mysql-mysql-sock-38

Run the database migrations

rake db:migrate

Install yarn and node modules

# as root
curl --silent --location https://dl.yarnpkg.com/rpm/yarn.repo | sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/yarn.repo
yum install yarn

# as avalon
su - avalon
cd /var/www/avalon
yarn install

Precompile assets

# as avalon
RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake assets:precompile

Restart Apache

# as root
systemctl restart httpd

Install ImageMagick

# as root
yum install imagemagick

Sidekiq

Avalon uses Sidekiq for background processing, which relies on Redis as its key-value store.

Install Redis

# as root
yum install redis
systemctl start redis

Install Sidekiq

# as root
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mperham/sidekiq/main/examples/systemd/sidekiq.service -O /lib/systemd/system/sidekiq.service

Edit the following lines in sidekiq.service 

WorkingDirectory=/var/www/avalon
ExecStart=/bin/bash -lc '/home/avalon/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.5.5/bin/bundle exec sidekiq -e production'
User=avalon
Group=avalon

# as root
systemctl start sidekiq

Sidekiq logs to STDOUT. 

Additional Configurations

Dropbox

groupadd -r dropbox
useradd -r avalondrop
usermod -G dropbox avalon
mkdir -p /srv/avalon/dropbox
chown avalondrop:dropbox /srv/avalon/dropbox
chmod 2775 /srv/avalon/dropbox

Edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config

# override default of no subsystems
Subsystem sftp internal-sftp
 
# Example of overriding settings on a per-user basis
#Match User anoncvs
# X11Forwarding no
# AllowTcpForwarding no
# ForceCommand cvs server
Match Group dropbox
ChrootDirectory /srv/avalon
X11Forwarding no
AllowTcpForwarding no
ForceCommand internal-sftp

Restart SSH

service sshd restart

Batch ingest

To manually start a batch ingest job, run as avalon user

rake avalon:batch:ingest

To make batch ingest run automatically whenever a manifest is present, you need to add a cron job. This cron job can be created by the whenever gem from reading config/schedule.rb. To preview, run

whenever

this will translate content in schedule.rb to cron job syntax. Once verified, run the following to write job to crontab

whenever --update-crontab

You should get the cron job automatically if you were deploying from Capistrano.

Authentication Strategy

Avalon comes with Persona by default but it can be configured to work with other authentication strategies by using the appropriate omniauth gems. The following example is applicable to Indiana University CAS, it may need some adjustments in order to work with other CAS implementation.

Add to Gemfile

gem 'net-ldap'
gem 'omniauth-cas', :git => "https://github.com/cjcolvar/omniauth-cas.git"

Install new gems

bundle install

Add to config/initializers/my-ldap.rb

module Avalon
      MY_GUEST_LDAP = Net::LDAP.new
      MY_GUEST_LDAP.host = "eads.myuni.edu"
      MY_GUEST_LDAP.authenticate 'cn=******,ou=Accounts,dc=eads,dc=myuni,dc=edu', '******'

      GROUP_LDAP = Net::LDAP.new
      GROUP_LDAP.host = "ads.myuni.edu"
      GROUP_LDAP.authenticate 'cn=******,ou=Accounts,dc=ads,dc=myuni,dc=edu', '******'
      GROUP_LDAP_TREE = "dc=ads,dc=myuni,dc=edu"
end

Add config/initializers/user_auth_cas.rb

require 'net/ldap'

User.instance_eval do
  def self.find_for_cas(access_token, signed_in_resource=nil)
    logger.debug "#{access_token.inspect}"
    #data = access_token.info
    username = access_token.uid
    email = nil

    user = User.where(:username => username).first

    unless user
      if email.nil?
        tree = "dc=ads,dc=myuni,dc=edu"
        filter = Net::LDAP::Filter.eq("cn", "#{username}")
        email = Avalon::GROUP_LDAP.search(:base => tree, :filter => filter, :attributes=> ["mail"]).first.mail.first
      end
      user = User.find_or_create_by_username_or_email(username, email)
      raise "Finding user (#{ user }) failed: #{ user.errors.full_messages }" unless user.persisted?
    end
    user
  end
end

Add to config/settings/production.local.yml

auth:
  configuration:
    - :name: My University
      :logo: my_logo.png
      :provider: :cas
      :params:
        :host: cas.myuni.edu
        :login_url: /cas/login
        :service_validate_url: /cas/validate
        :logout_url: /cas/logout
        :ssl: true

Using the System

You should be able to visit the webpage with just the hostname (ie http://localhost)

Create an admin account

Click on "Sign in" in the upper right corner of the website main page. Set up a default identity with administrative privileges using the following properties.

archivist1@example.com
<some password>

...

You can  create an account from the command line in the root of your avalon install:

...

You can find specific information about using the system in the Collection Manager's Guide.  /wiki/spaces/AVALON/pages/1957954522 is available for your convenience.  Upload new items individually or by batch directly via SFTP using the avalondrop account you created above.

Configure additional feataures

Known Issues - a list of bugs, workarounds, and cautions.

...

Code Block
chkconfig --level 345 tomcat on chkconfig --level 345 mysqldmariadb on chkconfig --level 345 nginx on chkconfig --level 345 sshd on chkconfig --level 345 red5redis on chkconfig --level 345 sidekiq on chkconfig --level 345 httpd on

...