Installation

Installation instructions for WebWork on AlmaLinux 8 or 9

Re: Installation instructions for WebWork on AlmaLinux 8 or 9

by Danny Glin -
Number of replies: 0

Unfortunately there aren't up to date instructions for RHEL.  There were some major changes between WW 2.17 and 2.18, so any instructions for versions prior to 2.18 will not be very helpful.

The good news is that with the latest versions (2.18 onward) the installation instructions are almost identical for different flavours of linux, the major difference being how you install the prerequisites.

You should be able to follow the instructions for Ubuntu, but for any command that involves apt you will need to substitute the appropriate installation command from the RHEL world.

Here's a synopsis from my notes when I installed on RHEL 8:

  • Install EPEL using the instructions at https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/epel/getting-started/
  • Use the following commands to install packages using the RHEL package manager:
    sudo dnf module install nodejs:18
    sudo dnf install MariaDB-client MariaDB-devel netpbm-progs git emacs perl-version cpanminus gcc perl-Archive-Zip perl-Array-Utils perl-interpreter perl-Carp perl-Class-Accessor perl-Data-Dump perl-Data-Dumper perl-Data-UUID perl-TimeDate perl-DateTime perl-DBI perl-Digest-MD5 perl-Digest-SHA perl-Email-Address-XS perl-Email-Sender perl-Errno perl-Exception-Class perl-File-Fetch perl-File-Find-Rule perl-File-Path perl-PathTools perl-File-Temp perl-GD perl-Getopt-Long perl-HTML-Parser perl-IO perl-JSON perl-JSON-MaybeXS perl-Locale-Maketext-Simple perl-LWP-Protocol-https perl-MIME-Base64 perl-Mojolicious perl-Net-IP perl-LDAP perl-Net-OAuth perl-PHP-Serialization perl-Pod-Usage perl-Scalar-List-Utils perl-SOAP-Lite perl-Socket perl-String-ShellQuote perl-Text-CSV perl-Text-Tabs+Wrap perl-Tie-IxHash perl-Time-HiRes perl-Types-Serialiser perl-URI perl-UUID-Tiny perl-XML-Parser perl-XML-Writer perl-YAML-LibYAML perl-Math-Random-Secure perl-XML-LibXML R perl-SQL-Abstract perl-Archive-Zip-SimpleZip perl-File-Copy-Recursive perl-GD-Barcode perl-HTML-Template pandoc perl-Path-Class perl-Template-Toolkit ImageMagick cmake
  • Install additional perl packages using cpanm:
    sudo cpanm Crypt::JWT Crypt::PK::RSA Data::Structure::Util DBD::MariaDB Email::Stuffer Future::AsyncAwait Mojolicious HTTP::Async Iterator Iterator::Util Locale::Maketext::Lexicon Minion Minion::Backend::SQLite Mojolicious::Plugin::NotYAMLConfig Pod::WSDL Statistics::R::IO SVG XML::Parser::EasyTree SQL::Abstract Mojolicious::Plugin::RenderFile DBD::MariaDB Pandoc Mojolicious::Plugin::SetUserGroup
  • Install LaTeX from source (modified from https://tug.org/texlive/quickinstall.html)
  1. cd /tmp # working directory of your choice
  2. wget https://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/install-tl-unx.tar.gz 
  3. zcat < install-tl-unx.tar.gz | tar xf -
  4. cd install-tl-*
  5. sudo perl ./install-tl –paper=letter –scheme=scheme-tetex
    1. Options (press O), then select create symlinks
    2. Depending on your disk space, you can change the installation scheme to "full scheme" (by pressing S) to make sure all necessary packages are installed.  If you don't you may need to install additional packages with the following commands:
    • sudo tlmgr install exam
    • sudo tlmgr install standalone

After this you should be able to follow the Ubuntu instructions, ignoring any "apt" commands.  When you get to the check dependencies section, if there are any missing perl modules you can install them one of two ways.  For example, if the missing package is "Foo::Bar", first try

sudo dnf install perl-Foo-Bar

If that doesn't work, try

sudo cpanm Foo::Bar

Please post back with your experiences with these instructions.  The intention is to add RHEL-specific instructions to the wiki, and it would be good if this could form the basis for them.