eXtensible Catalog (XC) Installation Profile

This installation profile makes it possible to quickly set up a complex site for a specific use in fewer steps than installing and configuring elements individually. It also populates the Drupal database with necessary settings, allowing an administrator to begin harvesting library metadata immediately after installing Drupal.

News: the first 7.x version is released!

Version 7.x-1.1

The main purpose of this release is to create a first stable release under Drupal 7. It contains some improvements as well, such as solving a memory leak in a long run cron based batch process, and enhancing the indexing speed.

Installation

The toolkit has four parts: the row of modules, a specific theme, a custom Apache Solr, and an Drupal distribution, which includes all necessary modules (XC and 3rd party ones), the current Drupal 7 core (7.22, with the necessary patch), and the theme. Previously the installation was quite complex, now we worked hard to make it easier.

The process is built on "drush", the Drupal command line tool. (see more: http://drupal.org/documentation/modules/drush).

The installation has two parts: a Drupal part, and a Solr part.

The Drupal part

If you have Drush:

$ cd /var/www    # the Apache httpd server's webroot directory
$ drush dl xc_installation-7.x-1.1 --drupal-project-rename=xc
$ cd xc
$ drush si xc_installation --db-url=mysqli://[mysql user]:[mysqlpw]@localhost/xc --site-name="eXtensible Catalog" --account-pass=admin
$ chmod a+w sites/default/files

Of course if you already have an xc MySQL database, use another name, such as xc7. Open http://localhost/xc in your browser. You can log in as admin/admin.

If you don't have Drush:

$ wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/xc_installation-7.x-1.1-core.tar.gz
$ tar -zxvf xc_installation-7.x-1.1-core.tar.gz
$ mv xc_installation-7.x-1.1 xc
$ mv xc /var/www/
$ cd /var/www/xc

From here you have to follow the Drupal installation from Step 2.. You can get the same instructions in the INSTALL.txt and INSTALL.mysql.txt files in the current directory. Here we give you a very short list of command, which fits for the typical situations.

Create database:

$ mysqladmin -u username -p create xc
$ mysql -u username -p
$ GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, INDEX, ALTER, CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES ON xc.* TO 'username'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
$ FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
$ exit

Prepare files:

$ cp sites/default/default.settings.php sites/default/settings.php
$ chmod o+w sites/default/settings.php
$ chmod o+w sites/default
$ mkdir sites/default/files
$ chmod o+w sites/default/files

Open http://localhost/xc/install.php in your browser and follow the instructions. When it finished remove write access from the settings.php:

$ chmod a-w sites/default/settings.php

The Solr part:

$ cd ~/solr  # or any other convenient location
$ wget http://extensiblecatalog.org/apache-solr-3.6.1-xc-6.x-1.3.tar.gz
$ tar -xvzf apache-solr-3.6.1-xc-6.x-1.3.tar.gz
$ cd apache-solr-3.6.1-xc-6.x-1.3/
$ ./solr.start

It will start Solr at http://localhost:8983/solr/ with all necessary settings, and Java libraries the Drupal Toolkit requires. Of course you need Java runtime environment to run Apache Solr. (As you can see the package is double compressed, we will improve it [singe compression] in the final release.)

If you want to use the WordNet suggestions, you have to start a multicore Solr setup. To do that simply run

$ multicore-start.sh

instead of solr.start. It will start Solr as http://localhost:8983/solr/xc and http://localhost:8983/solr/wordnet. You have to modify Solr path the following way:
1) go to admin/xc/metadata/location/list
2) click on edit
3) go to next page
4) edit the "path" value to "/solr/xc"
5) save

To stop Solr run solr.stop (or multicore-stop.sh if you use multicore setup).

To import the harvested records into relational database the Toolkit can use CSV files, and LOAD DATA INFILE commands or the more traditionally INSERT command. The first is much more quicker, but it requires general (and not database) level privilege in MySQL, which is not available in all situation. If you chose this, be very careful with privilege settings. The INSERT is slower command, but it requires only database level privileges, so it is more secure. If you have millions of records, and time is important factor, consider using LOAD DATA INFILE with carefully, if you don't have as many record, or time is not an important factor, use the INSERT command. Some MySQL version supports the "LOCAL" modifier in LOAD DATA INFILE command. If you found problems with the LOCAL modifier, change to LOAD DATA INFILE (without the LOCAL modifier). You can select this settings at the second page of harvest schedule editing form (admin/xc/harvester/schedule/[schedule ID]/edit).

Start using

After installation, you can begin harvesting metadata and using the Drupal Toolkit. With the profile installation, A metadata repository link is created to the demo Metadata Services Toolkit containing a few XC schema records as well as a default harvest schedule for this repository. Harvesting, therefore, will import those records into Drupal, create the appropriate nodes, and index them with Solr.

After harvesting, node generation, and indexing, you can start searching. Go to the XC search home page, which may be configured as your default home page after installation. Test by typing a term such as "harry potter" or simply a star ( * ) into the search box. You can also test the faceting functionality and see the results from different searches.

The installation profile does not configure every possible or useful setting. There are other components, such as NCIP servers, login forms, and institutional code for Syndetics services which are necessary for other features in the Drupal Toolkit, but not automatically configured because it differs dramatically from library to library.

Instead, the Drupal Toolkit provides a setup checklist that tells you where to go to record these information. It is available by navigating to Administration > eXtensible Catalog > Common functions > Setup checklist (admin/xc/common/setup_checklist).

Finally, we strongly suggest reading the online documentation.