Product Opener/Installation

Installation instructions for Product Opener (see Project:Product Opener).

Before you start

Product Opener is not yet released as open source. The instructions below are for reference and for early testers of Product Opener. They are very likely to change as the code will be restructured, made more independent of proprietary code and specific Open Food Facts uses etc.

When it is released, Product Opener will have much easier to use install scripts and instructions.

Install directory

Instructions below use /home/obf for the install directory, replace with your install dir.

Product Opener code

Configuration

startup.pl

This file is used to preload Perl module in Apache. It contains a path that needs to be updated:

# Needs to be configured
use lib "/home/obf/cgi/";

Config2.pm

Contains info about the domain, database and path. This is separated from Config.pm so that it is easy to create test instance that share the same configuration in Config.pm but are on other domains.

# server constants
$domain = "openbeautyfacts.org";

# server paths
$www_root = "/home/obf/html";
$data_root = "/home/obf";

$mongodb = "obf";

Required Perl modules

The following Perl modules need to be installed (some of them might be included with Perl).

To install a module, you can sometimes use packages.

e.g. on Debian / Ubuntu : apt-get install libdatetime-perl

Or you can use cpan:

cpan install DateTime

Cache::Memcached::Fast
Crypt::PasswdMD5
DateTime
DateTime::Format::Mail
Digest::MD5
Digest::SHA1
Encode::Punycode
File::Copy
File::Path
Geo::IP
Getopt::Long
GraphViz2
Hash::Util
HTML::Defang
HTML::Entities
Image::Magick
Image::OCR::Tesseract
IPC::Open3
JSON
LWP::Authen::Digest

MongoDB database

Install Mongodb.

The mongodb database name is configured in cgi/Config.pm

The mongodb database is created when the first product is added.

MongoDB indexes

See Product Opener mongodb indexes

Apache servers

In production we use a light weight Apache web server for static files (e.g. images) that does reverse proxying to a modperl Apache server that dynamically generates the HTML pages.

If the trafic is low or moderate, you can use only one Apache mod_perl server that also serves images etc.

In the example below, the Apache mod_perl server listens on port 19000.

Light-weight reverse proxy for static files

Add to httpd.conf:

<VirtualHost *>
DocumentRoot /home/obf/html
ServerName world.openbeautyfacts.org
ServerAlias *.openbeautyfacts.org

ErrorLog /home/obf/logs/proxy_error_log
CustomLog /home/obf/logs/proxy_access_log combined
ServerAdmin stephane@openbeautyfacts.org

<Directory "/home/obf/html">
    Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond  %{REQUEST_URI}  !/./
RewriteRule ^(/cgi/.*)$ http://localhost:19000$1 [P,L]
RewriteMap escape int:escape
RewriteRule ^/favicon.ico$ /favicon.ico [L]
RewriteCond  %{REQUEST_URI}  !^/images/
RewriteCond  %{REQUEST_URI}  !^/js/
RewriteCond  %{REQUEST_URI}  !^/rss/
RewriteCond  %{REQUEST_URI}  !^/robots
RewriteCond  %{REQUEST_URI}  !^/clicks/
RewriteCond  %{REQUEST_URI}  !^/data/
RewriteCond  %{REQUEST_URI}  !^/files/
RewriteRule  ^(.*)$ http://localhost:19000/cgi/display.pl?${escape:$1} [P,L,QSA]
</VirtualHost>


<VirtualHost *>
DocumentRoot /home/obf/html
ServerName openbeautyfacts.org
ErrorLog /home/obf/logs/proxy_error_log
CustomLog /home/obf/logs/proxy_access_log combined
DirectoryIndex index.html index.shtml
<Directory "/home/obf/html">
    Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^openbeautyfacts\.org
RewriteRule ^/products$ /products.shtml [L]

</VirtualHost>

modperl Apache server for dynamic pages

• download the latest version of the source of the Apache httpd server from the 2.2 branch (2.2.29 when writing this)
  • do not use the 2.4 branch as mod_perl is not yet compatible with it
• extract the source
• ./configure --with-mpm=prefork --prefix=/home/obf/apache --enable-rewrite --enable-proxy --enable-proxy_http --enable-deflate --disable-userdir --enable-headers
• make
• make install

• download the latest version of mod_perl from http://perl.apache.org/
• extract the source
• perl Makefile.PL MP_APXS=/home/obf/apache/bin/apxs
• make
• make install

Configuration

In /home/obf/apache/conf/httpd.conf:

Change the port:

Listen 19000

Add at the end:

PerlWarn Off
PerlRequire /home/obf/cgi/startup.pl


<Location /cgi>
SetHandler perl-script
PerlResponseHandler ModPerl::Registry
PerlOptions +ParseHeaders
Options +ExecCGI
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Location>


<VirtualHost *>
DocumentRoot /home/obf/html
ServerName world.openbeautyfacts.org
ErrorLog /home/obf/logs/error_log
CustomLog /home/obf/logs/access_log combined
ScriptAlias /cgi/ "/home/obf/cgi/"
</VirtualHost>

PerlPostReadRequestHandler My::ProxyRemoteAddr

Installation issues

Depending on your environment (in particular different versions of Linux, Apache, MongoDB, Perl, Perl modules etc.), you may encounter some issues when installing or running Product Opener.

Product Opener installation issues lists those issues and steps to resolve them.