Installing Xerte Online Toolkits on Ubuntu 22.04 Linux

Notes from own recent installation:

• on Proxmox, created a new virtual machine running Ubuntu 22.04, with 2 cores, 2 sockets, 4096 RAM, 50 Gb storage - see also here
• ran the Ubuntu installer, configuring a static IP address and creating a non-root sudo user during installation
• rebooted, logged in and updated the system
• if you weren’t using Proxmox, you would configure the firewall and SSH and take some additional security measures at this point, e.g. as per here
• installed LAMP stack (a standard Web server stack of Linux, Apache web server, MySQL database and PHP, a scripting language for interactive Web pages) following some of this: How To Install Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) Stack on Ubuntu 22.04 | DigitalOcean
  • I ignored the firewall parts as I am using the Proxmox firewalls and a reverse proxy (Nginx Proxy Manager)
• installed Apache web server with sudo apt install apache2
• created a subdomain on Cloudflare pointing to my Proxmox (without proxying for the moment)
• created a proxy host on Nginx Proxy Manager pointing to the VM IP address
• now I could see the Apache 2 default page on the subdomain address
• then installed MySQL with sudo apt install mysql-server
  • didn’t run the secure installation script (or rather tried and it didn’t work)
  • did change the root password
• then installed PHP (and extensions) with sudo apt install php libapache2-mod-php php-mysql php-dev php-gd php-imap php-ldap php-odbc php-pear php-xml php-xmlrpc php-zip php-curl php-mbstring
• downloaded the latest XOT from https://www.xerte.org.uk/index.php/en/downloads-1/send/3-xerte-online-toolkits/2135-xertetoolkits-3-12 (you need to have a free account and to be logged in)
• uploaded the downloaded zip file to Google Drive
• from Google Drive got the link for sharing the file with anyone and extracted the ID
• installed Python and then gdown · PyPI with pip to enable downloading of files to the VM from Google Drive
• downloaded the XOT zip file to the VM with /home/paul/.local/bin/gdown --id xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx (insert correct ID)
• created the Xerte installation folder with sudo mkdir -p /var/www/html/xerte
• unzipped the XOT files to the installation folder with unzip xertetoolkits_3.4.zip -d /var/www/html/xerte/
• set the permissions required
  • sudo chmod 777 /var/www/html/xerte
  • sudo chmod 777 /var/www/html/xerte/setup
  • sudo chmod 777 /var/www/html/xerte/USER-FILES
  • sudo chmod 777 /var/www/html/xerte/error_logs
  • sudo chmod 777 /var/www/html/xerte/import
  • sudo chown -R www-data:www-data -R /var/www/html
• restarted Apache with sudo systemctl reload apache2.service (and rebooted the VM for good measure)
• then navigated in a browser to subdomain.domain/xerte/setup/ to see the XOT Installer page
• clicked through the checks
  • ignored the warning about upload_tmp_dir not being set as I think it just uses the system default if not set
    • if I had wanted to change that I would have edited the appropriate config file with sudo vim /etc/php/8.1/apache2/php.ini
  • had provide the MySQL root password set earlier
  • created an admin XOT user
  • after getting to the “Install complete” page, deleted the setup folder etc as instructed
• navigated to subdomain.domain/xerte/management.php and logged in with the admin account
  • changed Site Administration/Site/Authentication settings to “Db”
  • checked everything was working
    • checked for Apache errors with sudo tail -f /var/log/apache2/error.log - just something harmless about language packs - checked for MySQL errors with sudo tail -f /var/log/mysql/error.log
• set up TLS (in my case with Nginx Proxy Manager)
• added the following to the custom config in NPM: location = /{return 301 $scheme://$http_host/xerte;} - now it redirects subdomain.domain to subdomain.domain/xerte
• logged in as admin and under Site Administration/Site/Site settings updated the URL to https
• enabled proxying on Cloudflare
• as admin, created an ordinary user for myself under Users
• logged in as ordinary user and began to author e-learning materials after enabling pop-ups in the browser
• much easier than last time when I did it on CentOS 7!