Installation Manual for 2.17 on Oracle (and related) Linux

Under Construction

These instructions cover the installation of WeBWorK 2.17 from scratch onto an Oracle Linux server. These instructions will probably mostly work for related Linux flavors such as RHEL 8.

If you are just upgrading WeBWorK, especially if you already have existing WeBWorK courses, see Upgrading WeBWorK from 2.16 to 2.17.

OS Users

These instructions reference four OS users.

• You should have a personal account with sudo privileges. These instructions will use "myname" as the name of that user.
• root
• apache
• wwadmin (we will create below)

It can be critical that you act as whatever user these instructions tell you to act as at each step. Do not act as root unless specifically instructed to.

Furthermore, when you will need to act as root, either use sudo su or sudo <command> as the instructions say. In certain places, actually switching users to root with sudo su or entering a root shell when a mere sudo someCommand was indicated will result in bad things that will not become apparent until later in the installation.

Notation

Now some comments on notation we will be using. We will use <key> to indicate that you should press a specific key (e.g. <Enter>, <Tab>, <F12>, etc.). Sometimes we will also use e.g. <wwadmin password> to indicate you have to enter the wwadmin password.

• Code blocks that begin with $ should be run as myname.
• Code blocks that begin with # should be run as root (via either a root shell or switching users to root with sudo su).
• Code blocks that begin with @ should be run as wwadmin (for which you can use sudo su wwadmin).

You are not intended to type the $, or #, or @ characters as part of the provided commands.

Assumptions

We assume that you already have Oracle (or a closely related Linix distribution) installed, but that you haven't done much with yet.

We assume that you have a user account myname with sudo privileges.

Create wwadmin

$ sudo useradd wwadmin

Install MariaDB

After logging in to your server:

$ sudo yum install mariadb-server mariadb-connector-c mariadb-connector-c-devel

Answer y if it asks if this is OK. (For the remainder of these instructions, such trivial details might be omitted.) Now fire it up.

$ sudo systemctl enable mariadb
$ sudo systemctl start mariadb

Check that it is active with

$ sudo systemctl status mariadb

Now secure the server.

$ sudo mysql_secure_installation

This asks you for the database root password, which is nothing at this point. You should just hit <Enter>. Next there are five questions. Answer as indicated:

• Set root password? n
• Remove anonymous users? n
• Disallow root login remotely? Y
• Remove test database and access to it? Y
• Reload privilege tables now? Y

Test that things work:

$ sudo mysql

You should see something close to:

Welcome to the MariaDB monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
...
...
...

MariaDB [(none)]> 

Now lets check the MariaDB users. To see the users, do the following

MariaDB> SELECT user,authentication_string,plugin,host FROM mysql.user;

You should see a table with only three users: root, root and root, each with a different host.

Now exit MariaDB

MariaDB> exit
Bye
$

Check perl version

The Oracle distribution used for this installation write-up has perl 5.26.3. Check if perl is installed and what its version is.

$ perl --version