Christopher Adams posted a set of instructions for installing a local version of OFLB. This means you can have your own Open Font Library running locally on a server or your own computer. This is handy for us in order to test the new design on a development copy, instead of doing things on a remote server.

We found a few hitches along the way, so we document here the whole process to have your own OFLB on a Fedora 15 system.

Install the LAMP stack

First, we’ll install Apache, MySQL and PHP. You’ll find complete directions for this in this Howtoforge link.

Now, let’s set up MySQL for the Aiki database, following the instructions on the Aiki wiki page.

For our purposes, we’re running all the commands as root. This is fine for our testing purposes, but be careful when doing this on a server you don’t own or have with you (rule of thumb: check with the systems administrator!)

Download Aiki and copy it over to the Apache root, making the aiki/ dir world writable during the installation process (don't forget to set this back in the end!):

cp aiki-rev-507.tar.gz /var/www/html
cd /var/www/html
tar xvzf aiki-rev-507.tar.gz
chmod 777 -v aiki

Now, we need to tweak some things before we proceed to installing Aiki.

There’s a little detail that’s worth knowing about, since it left us scratching our heads for a full afternoon before figuring out what was missing. It turns out that Fedora comes with SELinux activated. SELinux doesn’t really like Apache running scripts that create files on the local filesystem. So, we just went on and deactivated SELinux:

  echo 0 > /selinux/enforce

In order to make this permanent, we’ll need to edit /etc/sysconfig/selinux, and change the line

  SELINUX=enforcing

to

  SELINUX=permissive

Keep in mind that this will switch off all the protection provided by SELinux. We’d love to know a way to specifically tell SELinux to not care about Apache but keep running.

Now that this is out of the way, we can go on to install Aiki by pointing our browser to http://localhost/aiki, filling in the information and smiling at the ‘Installation complete’ message.

Install Open Font Library

For this, just follow Christopher’s instructions. Read below for some of our notes.

We only succeeded in importing the .sql files as root. An .sql file can be ‘imported’ into a database by running

mysql -u aiki -p aiki < commands.sql

In order to install Fontaine, download it, unpack it into a directory, cd to it and run

yum install cmake gcc-c++ freetype-devel graphviz graphviz-devel
cd trunk
cmake .
make

Now copy the bin/fontaine file to /assets/extensions/fontlibrary/scripts/, and go on with the installation.

Hopefully, this will have you running a full-fledged Open Font Library on your system. If you find any glitch during this process, let us know in the comments.

(for our reference, we dumped here the notes we've been taking during our quest to have OFLB running locally.)

On the Aiki documentation, change MySQL command in order to ask 
for the root password instead of typing it on the command line.
http://www.aikiframework.org/wiki/Create_SQL_User
Was:
- mysql -v -u root -ppassword
Should be:
- mysql -v -u root -p
s/-ppassword/-p/g

Also, the step "Create Aiki database" should make clear that 
you need to input the Aiki passwd, not root

Debugging the dreaded 'Wrong site name' error while submitting the 
Aiki installation form
* 'Wrong site name' turns out to be the error message that pops up 
  if your Aiki SQL table is not created.
* I replaced all instances of 'AllowOverride None' to 'All'. Not 
  sure if this is what I should have done. Still same error.
* I had unpacked aiki in my user home directory, then logged in 
  as root and copied it to /var/www/html.
* Somehow, I suspect this has to do with SELinux permissions. It 
  went away once I deleted the dir and unpacked the .tar.gz in 
  /var/www/html as root.

* After putting data on the installer, i get a blank box.
* After fiddling a bit, i got this error page, which was more 
  useful: 'Sorry, no permissions to create config.php, please 
  create it in /var/www/html/aiki with the following:'
* (I can't put my finger as to what caused the blank box and 
  what made it disappear, but maybe it has to do with me 
  installing PHPMyAdmin to check the database, which pulled some 
  dependencies that might have helped with this.)

* Now, trying to open 127.0.0.1/aiki, I get:
    Fatal Error: Wrong site name provided.
* From what I understood, this error pops up if there's problems 
  with the database. The 'aiki' database is still empty, and from 
  skimming aiki.php it looks like it expects it to be an 
  aiki_sites table there.
* Removed config file, changed dir ownership to 'apache:apache' 
  (was root:root) and opened aiki/index.php, filled details. 
  Same error.
* Chmodded recursively the aiki/ dir. Still, I get the same no 
  permission error for creating config.php. Apache log says:
    [Fri Jul 22 12:32:24 2011] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] PHP 
    Warning:  fopen(config.php): failed to open stream: 
    Permission denied in /var/www/html/aiki/system/libraries/installer.php 
    on line 296, referer: http://127.0.0.1/aiki/
* Here I removed the old aiki dir (since my chmodding probably 
  didn't do wonderful things) and created a new installation. 
  End up again with 'Wrong site name'. Restarted Apache. Same error.
* The fopen error in the Apache log leads me to think that this 
  is a permissions issue. However, aiki/ is set to 777 (r/w access
  for everyone), and I can create files in there with my regular 
  user account.
* About to give up, I went to /var/log/messages and grepped for 
  SELinux, as a last ditch check. And here:
    Jul 22 15:28:05 indra setroubleshoot: SELinux is preventing 
    /usr/sbin/httpd from write access on the directory aiki. For 
    complete SELinux messages. run sealert -l 
    0db385ec-53ea-488a-9c06-e7d7fe9cd4b3
* So, I try to temporarily disable SELinux:
    echo 0 > /syslinux/enforce
* After removing my manual config.php and filling in the install 
  form, success! I see the "Great!" screen, and I can now login 
  to my Aiki installation.
* Editing /etc/sysconfig/selinux and changing 'SELINUX=enforcing' 
  to 'SELINUX=permissive' will make this change permanent. It's 
  probably overkill to recommend deactivating SELinux, but as 
  long as it works for me, it's good.

Bumps while installing OFLB:
- Couldn't run the .sql files using user aiki, only root. 
  (followed everything on the Aiki howto for SQL setup)
- While importing oflb_aiki_widgets.sql, I get:
    ERROR 1062 (23000) at line 1: Duplicate entry '22' for key 
    'PRIMARY'
- Aha, that suggestion to run 'DELETE FROM aiki_widgets WHERE 
  app_id = '0';' turned out to be key.