xen-orchestra/from_the_sources.md

From the sources

WARNING: we don't make support for this manual installation. We cannot guarantee anything if used in production. Use it at your own risks.

WARNING 2: It's impossible to predict the result of a build for any Node and NPM versions. Please consider to use XOA before trying to play with the manual build, which can be difficult if you are not used to NodeJS and NPM.

Please take time to read it carefully.

This installation is validated against a fresh Debian 8 (Jessie) 64 bits. It should be almost the same on others dpkg systems. For RPMs based OS, it should be close, because most of our dependencies came from NPM and not the OS itself.

As you may have seen, in other parts of the documentation, XO is composed of two parts: XO-Server and XO-Web. They can be installed separately, even on different machines, but for the sake of simplicity we will set them up together.

Packages and Pre-requisites

NodeJS

XO needs Node.js. You can install it:

• by following this procedure.
• on Wheezy, the build from source was tested and working well.
• by using n, documented just below.

We'll use n because it's powerful and flexible. First, you need curl. Then, install it as root:

curl -o /usr/local/bin/n https://raw.githubusercontent.com/visionmedia/n/master/bin/n
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/n
n lts

We'll consider at this point that you've got a working node on your box. E.g:

$ node -v
v4.2.4

Be sure to have a recent version of npm by using npm i -g npm (>=2.7):

$ npm -v
3.5.3

Packages

XO needs those packages to be built and installed. Redis is used as a database by XO.

apt-get install build-essential redis-server libpng-dev git python-minimal

Fetching the Code

You may either download them here and here or use git with these repositories from http://github.com/vatesfr/xo-server and http://github.com/vatesfr/xo-web:

git clone -b stable http://github.com/vatesfr/xo-server
git clone -b stable http://github.com/vatesfr/xo-web

Installing dependencies

XO-Server

Once you have it, use npm, as the non-root user owning the fetched code, to install the other dependencies: go into XO-Server directory and launch the following command:

npm install && npm run build

Then, you have to create a config file for XO-Server:

cp sample.config.yaml .xo-server.yaml

Edit and uncomment it to have the right path to deliver XO-Web, because XO-Server embeds an HTTP server (we assume that XO-Server and XO-Web are on the same directory). It's near the end of the file:

  mounts: '/': '../xo-web/dist/'

Note this dist folder will be created in the next step (see the XO-Web section)

WARNING: YAML is very strict with indentation: use spaces for it, not tabs.

In this config file, you can also change default ports (80 and 443) for XO-Server.

You can try to start XO-Server to see if it works. You should have something like that:

$ npm start
WebServer listening on localhost:80
[INFO] Default user: "admin@admin.net" with password "admin"

XO-Web

First, we'll also install dependencies:

$ npm install

You can now install bower dependencies and build the application:

$ npm run build

Running XO

The sole part you have to launch is XO-Server which is quite easy to do, just launch the xo-server script, which is in the root of XO-Server's directory:

$ npm start

That's it! Go on your browser to the XO-Server IP address, and it works! :)

Misc

• You can also consider using forever to have always the process running.

$ npm install -g forever
$ forever start bin/xo-server

• Our stable branch is stable and the beta branch is next-release. You can change it if you want to test our latest features (on both XO-Server and XO-Web, do NOT mix them):

$ git checkout next-release

• If you want to update your current version, do this on both repositories:

$ git pull --ff-only
$ npm install
$ npm run build

Troubleshooting

If you have problem during the buiding phase in xo-web, follow these steps:

1. rm -rf node_modules
2. git checkout node_modules
3. npm install
4. npm run build

Same principle for xo-server:

1. rm -rf node_modules
2. npm install

FreeBSD

If you are using FreeBSD, you need to install these packages:

pkg install gmake redis python git npm node autoconf

You can update npm itself right now with a npm update -g

Because FreeBSD is shipped with CLANG and not GCC, you need to do this:

ln -s /usr/bin/clang++ /usr/local/bin/g++

To enable redis on boot, add this in your /etc/rc.conf:

redis_enable="YES"

Don't forget to start redis if you don't reboot now:

service redis start

External dependencies

In order to have Continuous Delta Backup working, you need to have the vhd-util binary inside your xo-server/bin folder.

You can find the sources here: https://github.com/rubiojr/vhd-util-convert