Installing Flectra

There are mutliple ways to install Flectra, or not install it at all, depending on the intended use case.

This documents attempts to describe most of the installation options.

Packaged installers
Suitable for testing Flectra, developing modules and can be used for long-term production use with additional deployment and maintenance work.
Source Install
Provides greater flexibility: e.g. allow multiple running Flectra versions on the same system. Good for developing modules, can be used as base for production deployment.
Docker
If you usually use docker for development or deployment, an official docker base image is available.

Packaged installers

Flectra provides packaged installers for Windows, deb-based distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, …) and RPM-based distributions (Fedora, CentOS, RHEL, …) for the Community versions.

These packages automatically set up all dependencies,but may be difficult to keep up-to-date.

Windows

  • Download the installer from our Community only or the Windows installer from the Download page (any edition)

  • Run the downloaded file

  • Accept the UAC prompt
  • Go through the various installation steps

Flectra will automatically be started at the end of the installation.

Linux

Debian/Ubuntu

Flectrahq ‘deb’ package currently supports Debian Stretch, Ubuntu Xenial, Ubuntu Zesty and Ubuntu Artful.

Prepare

Flectra needs a PostgreSQL server to run properly. The default configuration for the Flectra ‘deb’ package is to use the PostgreSQL server on the same host as your Flectra instance. Execute the following command as root in order to install PostgreSQL server :

# apt-get install postgresql -y

In order to print PDF reports, you must install wkhtmltopdf yourself: the version of wkhtmltopdf available in debian repositories does not support headers and footers so it can not be installed automatically. The recommended version is 0.12.5 and is available on the wkhtmltopdf download page, in the archive section.

Repository

Flectra provides a repository that can be used with Debian and Ubuntu distributions. It can be used to install Flectra by executing the following commands as root:

# wget -O - https://download.flectrahq.com/flectra.key | apt-key add -
# echo "deb https://download.flectrahq.com/1.0/pub/deb/ ./" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/flectra.list
# apt-get update && apt-get install flectra

You can then use the usual apt-get upgrade command to keep your installation up-to-date.

Deb Package

Instead of using the repository as described above, the ‘deb’ package can be downloaded here:

You can then use gdebi:

# gdebi <path_to_installation_package>

Or dpkg (handles less dependencies automatically):

# dpkg -i <path_to_installation_package> # this probably fails with missing dependencies
# apt-get install -f # should install the missing dependencies
# dpkg -i <path_to_installation_package>

This will install Flectra as a service, create the necessary PostgreSQL user and automatically start the server.

  • python3-vobject: Used in calendars to produce ical files.
  • python3-pyldap: Used to authenticat users with LDAP.
  • python3-qrcode: Used by the hardware driver for ESC/POS

If you need one or all of the packages mentioned in the above warning, you can install them manually. One way to do it, is simply using pip3 like this:

$ sudo pip3 install vobject qrcode
$ sudo apt install libldap2-dev libsasl2-dev
$ sudo pip3 install pyldap

If you need this feature, you can install the python module like this:

$ sudo pip3 install num2words

Fedora

FlectraHQ ‘rpm’ package supports Fedora 26. As of 2017, CentOS does not have the minimum Python requirements (3.5) for Flectra 1.0.

Prepare

Flectra needs a PostgreSQL server to run properly. Assuming that the ‘sudo’ command is available and configured properly, run the following commands :

$ sudo dnf install -y postgresql-server
$ sudo postgresql-setup --initdb --unit postgresql
$ sudo systemctl enable postgresql
$ sudo systemctl start postgresql

In order to print PDF reports, you must install wkhtmltopdf yourself: the version of wkhtmltopdf available in debian repositories does not support headers and footers so it can not be installed automatically. The recommended version is 0.12.1 and is available on the wkhtmltopdf download page, in the archive section.

Repository

Flectra provides a repository that can be used with the Fedora distibutions. It can be used to install Flectra Community Edition by executing the following commands:

$ sudo dnf config-manager --add-repo=https://download.flectrahq.com/1.0/pub/rpm/flectra_1.0.latest.noarch.rpm
$ sudo dnf install -y flectra
$ sudo systemctl enable flectra
$ sudo systemctl start flectra
RPM package

Instead of using the repository as described above, the ‘rpm’ package can be downloaded here:

Once downloaded, the package can be installed using the ‘dnf’ package manager:

$ sudo dnf localinstall flectra_1.0.latest.noarch.rpm
$ sudo systemctl enable flectra
$ sudo systemctl start flectra

Source Install

The source “installation” really is about not installing Flectra, and running it directly from source instead.

This can be more convenient for module developers as the Flectra source is more easily accessible than using packaged installation (for information or to build this documentation and have it available offline).

It also makes starting and stopping Flectra more flexible and explicit than the services set up by the packaged installations, and allows overriding settings using command-line parameters without needing to edit a configuration file.

Finally it provides greater control over the system’s set up, and allows more easily keeping (and running) multiple versions of Flectra side-by-side.

Prepare

Source installation requires manually installing dependencies:

  • Python 3.5+.

    • on Linux and OS X, using your package manager if not installed by default

    • on Windows, use the official Python 3 installer.

  • PostgreSQL, to use a local database

    After installation you will need to create a postgres user: by default the only user is postgres, and Flectra forbids connecting as postgres.

    • on Linux, use your distribution’s package, then create a postgres user named like your login:

      $ sudo su - postgres -c "createuser -s $USER"

      Because the role login is the same as your unix login unix sockets can be use without a password.

    • on OS X, postgres.app is the simplest way to get started, then create a postgres user as on Linux

    • on Windows, use PostgreSQL for windows then

      • add PostgreSQL’s bin directory (default: C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\9.4\bin) to your PATH

      • create a postgres user with a password using the pg admin gui: open pgAdminIII, double-click the server to create a connection, select Edit ‣ New Object ‣ New Login Role, enter the usename in the Role Name field (e.g. flectra), then open the Definition tab and enter the password (e.g. flectra), then click OK.

        The user and password must be passed to Flectra using either the -w and -r options or the configuration file

  • Python dependencies listed in the requirements.txt file.

    • on Linux, python dependencies may be installable with the system’s package manager or using pip.

      For libraries using native code (Pillow, lxml, greenlet, gevent, psycopg2, ldap) it may be necessary to install development tools and native dependencies before pip is able to install the dependencies themselves. These are available in -dev or -devel packages for Python, Postgres, libxml2, libxslt, libevent, libsasl2 and libldap2. Then the Python dependecies can themselves be installed:

      $ pip3 install -r requirements.txt

    • on OS X, you will need to install the Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install) then download and install a package manager of your choice (homebrew, macports) to install non-Python dependencies. pip can then be used to install the Python dependencies as on Linux:

      $ pip3 install -r requirements.txt

    • on Windows you need to install some of the dependencies manually, tweak the requirements.txt file, then run pip to install the remaning ones.

      Install psycopg using the installer here http://www.stickpeople.com/projects/python/win-psycopg/

      Then use pip to install the dependencies using the following command from a cmd.exe prompt (replace \YourFlectraPath by the actual path where you downloaded Flectra):

      C:\> cd \YourFlectraPath
C:\YourFlectraPath> C:\Python35\Scripts\pip.exe install -r requirements.txt

  • Less CSS via nodejs

    • on Linux, use your distribution’s package manager to install nodejs and npm.

      Once npm is installed, use it to install less:

      $ sudo npm install -g less

    • on OS X, install nodejs via your preferred package manager (homebrew, macports) then install less:

      $ sudo npm install -g less

    • on Windows, install nodejs, reboot (to update the PATH) and install less:

      C:\> npm install -g less

Fetch the sources

There are two ways to obtain the Flectra source code: zip or git.

  • Flectra zip can be downloaded from our flectrahq server or our flectrahq_zip page, the zip file then needs to be uncompressed to use its content
  • gitlab allows simpler update and easier switching between different versions of Flectra. It also simplifies maintaining non-module patches and contributions. The primary drawback of git is that it is significantly larger than a tarball as it contains the entire history of the Flectra project.

Running Flectra

Once all dependencies are set up, Flectra can be launched by running flectra-bin.

Configuration can be provided either through command-line arguments or through a configuration file.

Common necessary configurations are:

  • PostgreSQL host, port, user and password.

    Flectra has no defaults beyond psycopg2’s defaults: connects over a UNIX socket on port 5432 with the current user and no password. By default this should work on Linux and OS X, but it will not work on windows as it does not support UNIX sockets.

  • Custom addons path beyond the defaults, to load your own modules

Under Windows a typical way to execute flectra would be:

C:\YourFlectraPath> python3 flectra-bin -w flectra -r flectra --addons-path=addons,../mymodules --db-filter=mydb$

Where flectra, flectra are the postgresql login and password, ../mymodules a directory with additional addons and mydb the default db to serve on localhost:7073

Under Unix a typical way to execute flectra would be:

$ ./flectra-bin --addons-path=addons,../mymodules --db-filter=mydb$

Where ../mymodules is a directory with additional addons and mydb the default db to serve on localhost:7073

Virtualenv

Virtualenv is a tool to create Python isolated environments because it’s sometimes preferable to not mix your distribution python modules packages with globally installed python modules with pip.

This section will explain how to run Flectra in a such isolated Python environment.

Here we are going to use virtualenvwrapper which is a set of shell scripts that makes the use of virtualenv easier.

The examples below are based on a Debian 9 distribution but could be adapted on any platform where virtualenvwrapper and virtualenv are able to run.

This section assumes that you obtained the Flectra sources from the zip file or the git repository as explained above. The same apply for postgresql installation and configuration.

Install virtualenvwrapper

$ sudo apt install virtualenvwrapper
$ source /usr/share/virtualenvwrapper/virtualenvwrapper.sh

This will install virtualenvwrapper and activate it immediately. Now, let’s install the tools required to build Flectra dependencies if needed:

$ sudo apt install build-essential python3-dev libxslt-dev libzip-dev libldap2-dev libsasl2-dev

Create an isolated environment

Now we can create a virtual environment for Flectra like this:

$ mkvirtualenv -p /usr/bin/python3 flectra-venv

With this command, we ask for an isolated Python3 environment that will be named “flectra-env”. If the command works as expected, your shell is now using this environment. Your prompt should have changed to remind you that you are using an isolated environment. You can verify with this command:

$ which python3

This command should show you the path to the Python interpreter located in the isolated environment directory.

Now let’s install the Flectra required python packages:

$ cd your_flectra_sources_path
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

After a little while, you should be ready to run flectra from the command line as explained above.

When you you want to leave the virtual environment, just issue this command:

$ deactivate

Whenever you want to work again with your ‘flectra-venv’ environment:

$ workon flectra-venv

Docker

The full documentation on how to use Flectra with Docker can be found on the offcial Flectra docker image page.