SiikirPerl

How to install the Perl Siikir CMS.

Perlbrew

Recommended to install a custom Perl w/ perlbrew instead of using your vendor version of Perl. I made a dedicated user, bob that "owns" the Perl installation.

[bob]$ sudo mkdir /opt/perl5 && chown bob:bob /opt/perl5
[bob]$ export PERLBREW_ROOT="/opt/perl5"
[bob]$ wget -O - http://install.perlbrew.pl | bash
[bob]$ perlbrew init
[bob]$ perlbrew install perl-5.18.0
[bob]$ perlbrew switch perl-5.18.0

After installing Perl, make a symlink so that /opt/perl points to the Perl root, for example:

/opt/perl -> /opt/perl5/perls/perl-5.18.0

So that /opt/perl/bin/perl exists.

Apache Configuration

You'll need mod_fcgid, mod_rewrite, and probably mod_suexec. On Debian, install the package apache2-suexec-custom so that you can change suexec to use /home as its root (not needed if you plan to put your site under /var/www). The suexec config file is usually at /etc/apache2/suexec/www-data.

Typical VirtualHost configuration for mod_fcgid:

    <VirtualHost *:80>
      ServerName www.yoursite.com
      DocumentRoot /home/www/public_html
      CustomLog /home/www/logs/access_log combined
      ErrorLog /home/www/logs/error_log
      SuexecUserGroup www www
      <Directory "/home/www/public_html">
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks ExecCGI
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
      </Directory>
      <Directory "/home/www/public_html/fcgi">
        SetHandler fcgid-script
        Options +ExecCGI
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
      </Directory>
    </VirtualHost>

Follow that up with a .htaccess in your document root:

    <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
      RewriteEngine on
      RewriteBase /
      RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
      RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
      RewriteRule . /fcgi/index.cgi [L]
      RewriteRule ^$ /fcgi/index.cgi [L]
    </IfModule>

Perl Modules

The typical Siikir installation requires these modules. Install them using cpanminus as your Perl user (bob in my case).

$ cpan App::cpanminus

The required modules (install each with cpanm $NAME):

• CGI::Fast
• FCGI
• JSON
• JSON::XS
• Image::Magick*
• LWP::UserAgent
• Mail::Sendmail
• Template*
• Digest::SHA1
• Net::DNS

You'll need JSON::XS. JSON::PP doesn't quite cut it.

A couple modules have special cases and might not be installable via cpanm:

Image::Magick

Because of Image::Magick's ties with the C ImageMagick library, they need to be installed by hand. You'll need to download and build ImageMagick from imagemagick.org (it includes the Perl module, so you don't need to deal with CPAN at all for this one).

$ wget http://www.imagemagick.org/download/ImageMagick.tar.gz
$ tar -xzvf ImageMagick.tar.gz
$ cd ImageMagick-*/
$ ./configure --with-perl
$ make
$ make perl-sources
$ sudo make install
$ sudo ldconfig /usr/local/lib
$ cd PerlMagick
$ perl Makefile.PL
$ make
$ make test
$ make install

Note: If your site ever starts crashing (particularly after a software update) saying it can't find libmagick.so or something, run sudo ldconfig /usr/local/lib to rebuild the library cache.

Misc Notes

You'll need libperl-dev installed on the system (if you get an error like "can't find -lperl" when building).

Template

I sometimes have problems installing Template::Toolkit through cpanm because the test suite doesn't pass completely (35 out of several thousand tests fail). You can just download and install this module by hand and it works.