Install from Repository (RedHat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Scientific Linux)

There is an RPM software repository available for RedHat-based Linux distributions provided by the University of Osnabrück. This repository provides preconfigured Opencast installations, including all 3rd-Party-Tools. Using this method, you do not have to compile the software by yourself.

It may also be interesting for developers as all dependencies for Opencast usage, testing and development are provided by the RPM repository.

Currently supported are are

  • CentOS 7.x (x86_64)
  • RedHat Enterprise Linux 7.x (x86_64)
  • Scientific Linux 7.x (x86_64)

Other architectures like i386, i686, arm, … are not supported!

Registration

Before you can start you need to get an account for the repository. You will need the credentials that you get by mail after the registration to successfully complete this manual. The placeholders [your_username] and [your_password] are used in this manual wherever the credentials are needed.

Activate Repository

First you have to install the necessary repositories so that your package manager can access them:

  • Add Opencast repository:

    cd /etc/yum.repos.d
curl -O https://pkg.opencast.org/opencast.repo \
   -d os=el -d version=7 -u [YOUR_USERNAME]

    You will be asked for your password.

    It might take some time after the final version is released before the RPMs are moved to the stable repository. Before that, you can use .../opencast-testing.repo instead to get the latest version.

  • Add EPEL repository:

    yum install epel-release

Install 3rd-party-tools

This step is optional and only recommended for those who want to build Opencast from source. If you install Opencast from the repository, all necessary dependencies will be installed automatically.

You can install all necessary 3rd-Party-Tools for Opencast like this:

yum install ffmpeg tesseract hunspell sox

Install Apache ActiveMQ

The Apache ActiveMQ message broker is required by Opencast since version 2.0. It does not necessarily have to be installed on the same machine as Opencast but would commonly for an all-in-one system. ActiveMQ is available from the Opencast RPM repository as well and can be installed by running:

yum install activemq-dist

A prepared configuration file for ActiveMQ can be found at /usr/share/opencast/docs/scripts/activemq/activemq.xml after Opencast itself has been installed and should replace /etc/activemq/activemq.xml. For an all-in-one installation the following command should suffice:

cp /usr/share/opencast/docs/scripts/activemq/activemq.xml /etc/activemq/activemq.xml

ActiveMQ should be started prior to Opencast.

More information about how to properly set up ActiveMQ for Opencast can be found in the message broker configuration documentation.

Install Opencast

For this guide, opencast22-* is used as placeholder for the package name. It will install the latest version of the Opencast 2.2.x branch. If you want to install another version, please change the name accordingly.

Basic Installation

For a basic installation (All-In-One) just run:

yum install opencast22-allinone

This will install the default distribution of Opencast and all its dependencies, including the 3rd-Party-Tools.

Now you can start Opencast:

  • On a SysV-init based system

    service opencast start

  • On a Systemd based system

    systemctl start opencast.service

While Opencast is preconfigured, it is strongly recommended to follow at least the Basic Configuration guide. It will help you to set your hostname, login information, …

Advanced Installation

While the basic installation will give you an all-in-one Opencast distribution which is nice for testing, you might want to have more control over your system and deploy it over several machines by choosing which parts of Opencast you want to install. You can list all Opencast packages with:

yum search opencast

Starting with Opencast 2.2, this will list all available Opencast distributions in the form opencast<version>-<dist-type>

Current available distributions are:

  • opencast22-admin
  • opencast22-adminworker
  • opencast22-allinone
  • opencast22-ingest
  • opencast22-presentation
  • opencast22-worker

Uninstall Opencast

Sometimes you want to uninstall Opencast. For example to do a clean reinstall. You can do that by executing:

yum remove 'opencast*'

This will not touch your created media files or modified configuration files. If you want to remove them as well, you have to do that by yourself.

# Remove media files
sudo rm -rf /srv/opencast

# Remove local db, search index and working files
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/opencast

# Remove configuration files
sudo rm -rf /etc/opencast

# Remove logs
sudo rm -rf /var/log/opencast

Troubleshooting

Missing Dependencies

If you try to install Opencast but yum is complaining about missing dependencies, please check if the epel repository is really activated on your system. Some distributions come with epel preinstalled but disabled. The installation of the epel-release package will not fix this. You can check what repositories are installed and enabled by executing yum repolist enabled which should give you a list with epel, opencast and opencast-noarch in it. To enable a repository, edit the configuration file in /etc/yum.repos.d/.

Conflicting Libvpx

CentOS comes with an old version of libvpx. This version is required by some packages like GStreamer. The FFmpeg we use requires a new version. It is a known risk but since the new version performs significantly better, we decided to go that way.

You do not need GStreamer or any of the other packages requiring libvpx for an Opencast server. You can just remove them from your system by running yum remove libvpx before installing Opencast.