Free, easy to use all-in-one installer for eZ Publish

Author Message

Daniel Lopez

Monday 02 June 2008 7:57:29 am

Hi,

We at the BitNami project just released a stack for eZ Publish. It will install Apache, MySQL, PHP and eZ Publish using a GUI installer. It is freely available under the terms of the Apache 2.0 open source license, check it out:

http://bitnami.org/stack/ezpublish

This stack should help everybody who is getting started with eZ Publish.

Best regards

Daniel

Łukasz Serwatka

Friday 06 June 2008 12:28:07 am

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for sharing this information. I will certainly give a try ;)

Personal website -> http://serwatka.net
Blog (about eZ Publish) -> http://serwatka.net/blog

Daniel Lopez

Thursday 12 June 2008 12:13:25 am

Hi Lucasz,

Please let us know what you think, what we can improve, and so on. We have gotten about 400 downloads in just a few days, it seems BitNami users like eZ publish :)

Cheers

Daniel

Łukasz Serwatka

Thursday 12 June 2008 1:35:13 am

Hi Daniel,

I have tired windows package on Windows XP Pro. Installation was very easy and no problems. However there is space for improvements:

* Add link to admin site access, I figured out very quickly but less experienced user will have problems. There should be link on welcome page.
* Add once sentence that admin password is same what given during installation process
* Install PHP accelerator, APC or eAccelerator (we recommend APC in general)
* Enable exif PHP extension
* Those 2 files were modified in kernel kernel/setup/steps/ezstep_data.php
kernel/setup/steps/ezstep_welcome.php. Did not exact changes, but in general they should not be changed.
* Remove index.php, use VH setup
* strtotime() [<a href='function.strtotime'>function.strtotime</a>]: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. Please use the date.timezone setting, the TZ environment variable or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'America/Los_Angeles' for '-7.0/DST' instead in C:\Program Files\BitNami eZ Publish Stack\apps\ezpublish\htdocs\lib\ezfile\classes\ezlog.php on line 12

Will do more testing later.

In general, it was very easy and quick to setup fully functional eZ Publish site :)

Personal website -> http://serwatka.net
Blog (about eZ Publish) -> http://serwatka.net/blog

Piotrek Karaś

Thursday 12 June 2008 9:04:17 am

Daniel,

I haven't tried it yet, but before I try to try - how do you cope with a situation when there had already been a LAMP installation in the system? I have some very bad experiences with similar installers as they never "worried" about such details, but then it was more than 2-3 years ago and maybe the trends have changed since then.

Cheers,
Piotrek

--
Company: mediaSELF Sp. z o.o., http://www.mediaself.pl
eZ references: http://ez.no/partners/worldwide_partners/mediaself
eZ certified developer: http://ez.no/certification/verify/272585
eZ blog: http://ez.ryba.eu

Daniel Lopez

Friday 13 June 2008 11:19:08 am

Hi Piotrek,

We also had some such bad experiences :) Fear not, the installers are completely self contained and will not interfere with an existing MySQL or Apache installation. For example, if they detect a running Apache server in port 8080, it will ask you to choose a different port.

If you want to uninstall the stack, either simply stop all services and rm -rf the installation directory, or just run the uninstaller.

You can even run several stacks in parallel!

Cheers

Daniel

Daniel Lopez

Friday 13 June 2008 11:21:55 am

Hi Lucasz,

Thanks a lot for your detailed feedback and for taking the time to post it. Just a quick line to let you know I need to check some details with the other project members and we will address some of the points (for example we were already planning APC support)

Cheers

Daniel

Daniel Lopez

Monday 16 June 2008 7:29:18 am

Hi Lucasz,

Some responses to your suggestions:

* Add link to admin site access, I figured out very quickly but less experienced user will have problems. There should be link on welcome page.

How does the user know about this page usually? We can include in the main BitNami page in a future release of the stack

* Add once sentence that admin password is same what given during installation process

Ok, we include this information in the README file.

* Install PHP accelerator, APC or eAccelerator (we recommend APC in general)

We will include in a future release (some PHP apps have problems with it, so we will leave disabled by default)

* Enable exif PHP extension

We will include in future release

* Those 2 files were modified in kernel kernel/setup/steps/ezstep_data.php
kernel/setup/steps/ezstep_welcome.php. Did not exact changes, but in general they should not be changed.

This files were changed to avoid the installation wizard. Do you have a way that we could bypass the wizard programmatically?

* Remove index.php, use VH setup

Ok

* strtotime() [<a href='function.strtotime'>function.strtotime</a>]: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. Please use the date.timezone setting, the TZ environment variable or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'America/Los_Angeles' for '-7.0/DST' instead in C:\Program Files\BitNami eZ Publish Stack\apps\ezpublish\htdocs\lib\ezfile\classes\ezlog.php on line 12

This is fixed now and will be ok in the next release

Thanks again for your feedback

Best regards

Daniel

Greg McAvoy-Jensen

Monday 16 June 2008 12:40:58 pm

Thank you for providing this bundle!

To bypass the installation wizard, just be sure there's a file called settings/override/site.ini.append.php with the following:

[SiteAccessSettings]
CheckValidity=false

Granite Horizon, Certified Developer of eZ Publish Web Solutions
Provider of the SaaS Solution Granite Horizon In The Cloud | http://granitehorizon.com/cloud
http://granitehorizon.com | +1 916 647 6350 | California USA | @granitegreg
Blog: http://granitehorizon.com/blog

Manuel F Viera

Wednesday 18 June 2008 8:14:56 am

Hi Greg,

The setting/override/site.ini.append.php file does not exist by
default in a eZpublish clean installation, meaning that if you extract
the ezpublish sources into apache/htdocs this directory
(settings/override) is empty by default. If i'm not wrong this
directory is populated during the ezpublish installation.

We use kickstart.ini because we can configure all installation
parameters, but on this way we won't be able to avoid welcome step.
For doing it we need to change some code into ezstep_welcome.php (I
changed a return value for avoid welcome webpage) and ezstep_data.php
(I comment two lines in an array that it contains all wizard steps, i
remember that a "Site Packages" step is commented by default).

Doing it this way we can complete the wizard as unattended mode.

Do you have some suggestions on how we can improve this?

Best Regards,
Manuel.

Greg McAvoy-Jensen

Wednesday 18 June 2008 11:18:17 am

Manuel,

The installation wizard is optional. If you prefer, you could do use the manual installation method (http://ez.no/doc/ez_publish/technical_manual/4_0/installation/manual_installation) with a simple script. This way you wouldn't have to hack the kernel.

Another downside of hacking the kernel: when someone prepares to upgrade to the next version of eZ Publish, they'll run the upgrade check from the admin interface. The user will be given a warning stating that the files aren't consistent with the distribution. Users who aren't aware of what changes were made would then have to evaluate the importance of that message. In reality the changes are probably inconsequential for an upgrade, but the user would waste time figuring that out.

Granite Horizon, Certified Developer of eZ Publish Web Solutions
Provider of the SaaS Solution Granite Horizon In The Cloud | http://granitehorizon.com/cloud
http://granitehorizon.com | +1 916 647 6350 | California USA | @granitegreg
Blog: http://granitehorizon.com/blog

Malebo H

Sunday 22 June 2008 5:31:01 am

Hello!

I have just made my installation on the system Windows xp.
1 - Is it possible to have the choice of language to the installation? (ex : Frensh)
2 – When you put the new editor: eZ Online Editor MCE ?
3 – Why not to have chosen the most recent version:eZ publish 4.0.1 ?
3 – I regularly have the error message according to: Fatal error: eZ Publish did not finish its request
The execution of eZ Publish was abruptly ended, the debug output is present below.

Cordially

Manuel F Viera

Monday 23 June 2008 9:57:01 am

Hi Malebo,

I worked about you are asking, but i have a question for you. Are you using a BitNami eZpublish Stack? If yes:

1. We add English and French languages by default, but BitNami eZpublish installer don't ask about it. Otherwise you can install more languages after installation in admin_site>Setup>languages (on the left).
2. eZpublish 4.0.1 is a rc1. We try to work with releases, not release candidates.
3. eZ Online Editor is a beta3 yet. We won't include it in our eZpublish stack (for now). But I'm looking into how to install it into ezpublish and you must to do the following:
- Download it at http://ez.no/developer/contribs/applications/ez_oe_mce
- Unpack the files at eZpublish htdocs/extension directory.
- Now you must to access into ez admin_site > click on the Setup tab > Extensions (on the left).
You will see all the installed extension. Now you must to check in "ezoe" extension and Apply changes. You'll get the "Fatal Error" but your changes will be sabed.
If you want to know more about this online editor installation you can read the INSTALL file into ezoe directory.
4. About the Fatal error, can you read apache error_log?. I'm having the following:

PHP Fatal error: Class 'ezcFile' not found in /home/mviera/ezpublish-4.0.0-2/apps/ezpublish/htdocs/lib/ezutils/classes/ezautoloadgenerator.php on line 283, referer: http://bitrock-desktop:8082/ezpublish/index.php/admin_site/setup/extensions

I was looking for this error into eZpublish forums and looks like that it isn't an ezpublish or ezpublish stack error, this php file tries to regenerate configuration file dynamically, flush caches, etc; I have found a people with the same error and he fixed it installing ezComponents (http://ezcomponents.org). You can see the solution at:

http://ez.no/developer/forum/extensions/problem_creating_extension_fetch_functions/re_problem_creating_extension_fetch_functions__1

Cheers,
Manuel.

Malebo H

Tuesday 24 June 2008 10:58:02 am

Hello Daniel !

Thank you for your answers. In spite of some failures all seems to function. I continue my tests
Cordially

Malebo H

Tuesday 24 June 2008 11:05:48 am

Hi !
Manuel
Ye i used a BitNami eZpublish Stack
And thank you for the method to solve my errors while probably waiting for a stable version of eZ publish 4.1
Cordially

Michael Gross

Thursday 02 July 2009 5:50:35 pm

I've just used the BitNami installer for eZ publish on Mac OS X (I'm running v10.4.11). The first time I've had an eZ install work. Thank-you!

The only thing I wish is that I'd known that your GUI utility for starting and stopping the servers is only packaged with your MAMP stack (no CMS). I would have installed that and then tried to add your eZ publish CMS-only package to it. Oh, well. It's running and I'm not going to mess with it.

Michael

Heath

Thursday 02 July 2009 6:30:53 pm

More information on Bitnami based installers centralized at eZpedia community wiki, <i>http://ezpedia.org/ez/bitnami</i>

Cheers,
Heath

Brookins Consulting | http://brookinsconsulting.com/
Certified | http://auth.ez.no/certification/verify/380350
Solutions | http://projects.ez.no/users/community/brookins_consulting
eZpedia community documentation project | http://ezpedia.org

Jozef Baum

Friday 03 July 2009 9:02:54 am

"It will install Apache, MySQL, PHP and eZ Publish using a GUI installer." Daniel Lopez

Why didn't you include ImageMagick?

Ekkehard Dörre

Wednesday 10 November 2010 5:16:58 am

Hi Daniel,

there is no update since http://bitnami.org/files/stacks/ezpublish/changelog.txt

Version: 4.1.3-1        2009-07-09

are there any further plans to support eZ Publish?

Thanks and greetings, ekke

http://www.coolscreen.de - Over 40 years of certified eZ Publish know-how: http://www.cjw-network.com
CJW Newsletter: http://projects.ez.no/cjw_newsletter - http://cjw-network.com/en/ez-publ...w-newsletter-multi-channel-marketing

Ekkehard Dörre

Thursday 23 December 2010 1:33:03 am

Hi all,

there was the answer via http://twitter.com/jeanvoye/ eZ Publish 4.4.0 Stacks, Virtual Appliances and AMIs released http://bitnami.org/stack/ezpublish

Greetings, ekke

http://www.coolscreen.de - Over 40 years of certified eZ Publish know-how: http://www.cjw-network.com
CJW Newsletter: http://projects.ez.no/cjw_newsletter - http://cjw-network.com/en/ez-publ...w-newsletter-multi-channel-marketing

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