Running Dspace on FreeBSD

Submitted by tim ribaric on Fri, 01/16/2009 - 17:47

Getting Dspace up and running is a bit of a handful. The difficulty is mostly due to the fact that it is Java based, (In my opinion anyway) Every different distro has a different way to setup the prerequisites so a standard install guideline won't be very useful. The following are the key points required to get Dspace up and going on a FreeBSD system.

The General Steps

Install PostgresServer8.3 from /usr/ports
Install Tomcat5.5 from /usr/ports
Install Apache Ant from /usr/ports
Install Jakarat-Apache from /usr/ports
OR do a portinstall of Dspace... (More on this later I guess)

Make it Pretty

One thing to keep in mind... make sure that it runs on the standards ports and that it uses the xmlui. Nothing sounds less appealing then http://dspace.myschool.edu:8081/xmlui:

Get rid of the /xmlui - in /usr/local/tomcat5.5/webapps where your end WARS will end up, create a softlink: ln -s /usr/local/tomcat5.5/webapps/xmlui ROOT Now you'll be able to access the app without any trailing info on the TLD
Standard Ports - Running any service on a port below the 1024 boundary (not as root) is not a trivial task to accomplish. The tutorial explains how to use the jsvc utility to do it.
Make your TLD more exciting then dspace.myschool.edu... Please.

Next Steps?

... Porting content and metadata out of Gallery2