Installing → Software Requirements

Open XDMoD requires the following software:

Linux Distribution Packages

Open XDMoD can be run on any Linux distribution, but has been tested on CentOS 7.

Most of the requirements can be installed with the package managers available from these distributions.

CentOS 7

NOTE: The package list below includes packages included with EPEL. This repository can be added with this command for CentOS 7:

# yum install epel-release

# yum install httpd php php-cli php-mysql php-gd php-pdo php-xml \
              libreoffice \
              nodejs \
              mariadb-server mariadb cronie logrotate \
              perl-Image-ExifTool php-mbstring php-pecl-apcu jq \
              chromium-headless librsvg2-tools

NOTE: After installing Apache and MySQL you must make sure that they are running. CentOS may not start these services and they will not start after a reboot unless you have configured them to do so.

NOTE: APCu is optional, but highly recommended as it provides enhanced performance.

Rocky 8+

NOTE: The nodejs version that is enabled by default in Rocky 8 is nodejs 10. Open XDMoD requires nodejs 16 which can be installed on Rocky 8 using the nodejs 16 module stream as follows:

dnf module -y reset nodejs
dnf module -y install nodejs:16

NOTE: The method to install the system level mongodb drivers has changed for Rocky 8. To account for this, you will need to run the following:

dnf install -y php-devel
pecl install mongodb
echo "extension=mongodb.so" > /etc/php.d/40-mongodb.ini

You can double check that the installation was successful by running the following and confirming that there is output:

php -i | grep mongo

Additional Notes

PHP

Open XDMoD is tested to work with the versions of PHP that is supplied with Centos 7 (PHP 5.4.16) and Rocky 8 (PHP 7.2). Open XDMoD is not compatible with PHP 8 at this time.

Some Linux distributions (including CentOS) do not set the timezone used by PHP in their default configuration. This will result in many warning messages from PHP. You should set the timezone in your php.ini file by adding the following, but substituting your timezone:

date.timezone = America/New_York

The PHP website contains the full list of supported timezones.

Production Open XDMoD instances should use HTTPS, which is enabled via the webserver configuration (see below).

Apache

Production instances of Open XDMoD should use HTTPS. This requires the mod_ssl module be installed and enabled. The mod_headers module is also recommended so that the HTTP Strict-Transport-Security header can be set on the webserver.

Open XDMoD requires that mod_rewrite be installed and enabled. Since the Open XDMoD portal is a web application you will also need to make sure you have configured your firewall properly to allow appropriate network access.

MySQL

MySQL 5.5.3+ is currently required for use with Open XDMoD.

Open XDMoD is tested to work with MariaDB 5.5.60 and may be compatible with more recent releases of MySQL and MariaDB. Open XDMoD is currently not compatible with MySQL 8.0 at this time.

Refer to the Configuration Guide for configuration details.

Chromium

Chromium is required for graph exporting.

Open XDMoD has been tested with chromium-headless from EPEL, chromium from EPEL was shown to be usable, but is not actively tested.

SELinux

Open XDMoD does not work with the default CentOS SELinux security policy. You will need to disable SELinux.