New Installation Using WSAPI

The Kepler Installer is no longer supported and should not be used for new installations. Instead, follow the instructions on the WSAPI page.

Old Installation Procedures

For those still using the Kepler Installer, here are the old instructions:

Unix All-In-One Installation v1.1

Unix users can enjoy the latest release of Kepler Installer using an all-in-one installer that includes everything you'll need (Lua, LuaRocks and the necessary modules).

Note: if you are using Ubuntu, you may need to install the readline and build-essential packages using,

sudo apt-get install libreadline-dev build-essential

Get the Kepler installer from LuaForge. The kepler installer is called kepler-install-x.y-z.

Make sure the script has the right permissions:

chmod +x kepler-install-x.y-z

Choosing where to install files

To install in your home directory use

./kepler-install-x.y-z --prefix=$HOME

To install in the /usr/local default prefix (as root) use

sudo ./kepler-install-x.y-z

Note: if you need to use a different configuration, check ./kepler-install-x.y-z --help for the installer's options.

The installation

The installer will then show where everything will be installed and you cancel the process if needed. Once confirmed the configuration options, the installer installs Lua 5.1, LuaRocks, the base modules, and Xavante on the respective places.

Testing if everything is OK

Once the installer is finished, just run

xavante_start

and check http://localhost:8080 to see Xavante running!

Installation via LuaRocks

luarocks install kepler-xavante

Troubleshooting

KEPLER_WEB command not found

If you get error KEPLER_WEB: command not found you need something like this:

luarocks install kepler-xavante KEPLER_WEB=/var/www

Look at [this thread]: http://lists.luaforge.net/pipermail/kepler-project/2009-April/003261.html

Using CGI/FastCGI

The instructions below work either for CGI or FastCGI, assuming you have the correct Apache module (mod_cgid or mod_fcgid). For FastCGI, just replace cgilua.cgi with cgilua.fcgi in the instructions.

If you already have a web server like Apache, running CGILua via CGI is the simplest option. Assuming you've installed Kepler in ~/kepler, just copy cgilua.cgi to your cgi-enabled directory:

cp ~/kepler/bin/cgilua.cgi ~/mysite/cgi-bin/cgilua.cgi

With shared hosting your hosting company will tell you where you are supposed to put CGI scripts. On your own machine, this would probably /var/www by default.

cgilua.cgi is just a wrapper, however, so you will need a LuaPage page to actually see something in the browser. You can start with the pages sitting in ~/kepler/htdocs, but you'll need to copy them to your site directory:

cp -r ~/kepler/htdocs/* ~/media.freewisdom.org/keplertest/

Now you can finally see CGILua in action: go to a URL like:

http://media.freewisdom.org/keplertest/cgilua.cgi/keplertest/test.lp

Note that what follows cgilua.cgi must be a path to the .lp file from the top of your site directory. I.e.,

http://media.freewisdom.org/keplertest/cgilua.cgi + /keplertest/test.lp

Notes:

If you get a "500" error when accessing the page, check your permissions. Some hosts, e.g. Webfaction, are picky about the permissions for your script. On the one hand, you must give other users permission to run it, on the other hand, some servers do not like it if you give other users ability to edit the file. (This is a security precaution.) "chmod 711" would usually work. ("711" = full access to yourself, only execute permissions for others.) You might need to set the same permissions on the directory where the cgilua.cgi is located. In our case, we would enter:

chmod 711 ~/media.freewisdom.org/keplertest/cgilua.cgi
chmod 711 ~/media.freewisdom.org/keplertest

Configuring CGI on a Mac

Assuming you have enabled Apache to serve pages on your Mac (start the System Preferences/Sharing/Personal Web Sharing service for that), you have two options to use Kepler - either in your home directory or in the system wide Apache directory.

In the first case, your HTML files should go to the ~/Sites directory and in the second they would go to the /Library/WebServer/Documents directory. But what about the cgi launcher?

If you want to access your Kepler scripts with a URL like servername/cgi-bin/cgilua.cgi/index.lp then you should copy the cgilua.cgi file to /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables and things should work fine if the file index.lp is in the /Library/WebServer/Documents directory.

To reach documents elsewhere, say in your user-specific Sites directory, use a URL s.a. servername/cgi-bin/cgilua.cgi/~user/test.lp. Note that Finder localizes the name of the Sites folder for non-english users; it's still the same folder underneath.

For more details on how to configure Apache on your Mac you can check this O'Reilly article: Apache Web-Serving with Mac OS X. The Apache configuration file at /etc/httpd/httpd.conf has rather good comments, too.

Using Mod-Rewrite to Hide the URL

You should now be able to call a Lua Page or a Lua Script, but you must use a somewhat unwieldy URL. You can fix it with .htaccess:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^myapp/(.*)$ /keplertest/cgilua.cgi/keplertest/$1 [L]

Now instead of using the long URL, I can refer to test.lp file with just http://media.freewisdom.org/myapp/test

UNIX Installation