Getting Started

This page walks you through installing a copy of the OpenSurfaces server on an Ubuntu Linux machine. I have only tested Ubuntu 12.04.

If not using Ubuntu, you can create a virtual machine using VirtualBox and install Ubuntu 12.04.

Installing the server

This script sets up everything you need (installs packages, downloads all data, sets up webserver and database):

./install_all.sh

The webserver and database will use ~15G of disk space when fully expanded.

Prompts: The installer will automatically ask you to specify some variables the first time. If you want to re-run the installer with different answers, delete scripts/config.sh before running the installer again.

Wait an hour: The installer will take some time to finish, with most of the time spent compiling numpy/scipy and building database indices. Note that you may have to give a sudo password multiple times since the installer takes so long.

Problems: If you have problems with the installation, you can run the entire installer again after fixing any issues. Note that re-running the installer will destroy any existing data, reverting it back to the original dataset. Please tell me about any problems you have by filing a bug report on https://github.com/seanbell/opensurfaces or by emailing me at (Sean Bell).

Visit the homepage

At this point, the website should be publicly viewable from your machine. You can now visit http://$SERVER_NAME/ in a web browser (SERVER_NAME is defined in scripts/config.sh if you forgot what it is set to; the default is localhost). To help set up things for the first time, DEBUG mode is turned on.

To turn off the public webserver, run

./scripts/make_private.sh

and to turn it back on:

./scripts/make_public.sh

Unfortunately not everything is set up yet – continue to Setup for additional setup information.