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Install Ibexa DXP

Note

Installation for production is only supported on Linux.

To install Ibexa DXP for development on macOS or Windows, see the installation guide for macOS and Windows.

Installing Ibexa OSS

This installation guide shows in details how to install Ibexa DXP for users who have a subscription agreement with Ibexa. If you want to install Ibexa OSS, you do not need authentication tokens or an account on updates.ibexa.co, but must adapt the steps shown here to the product edition and the ibexa/oss-skeleton repository.

Prepare work environment

To install Ibexa DXP you need a stack with your operating system, MySQL or MariaDB, and PHP.

You can install it by following your favorite tutorial, for example: Install LAMP stack on Ubuntu.

Additional requirements:

  • Node.js and Yarn for asset management.
  • git for version control.

For production you also need Apache or nginx as the HTTP server (Apache is used as an example below).

Before getting started, make sure you review other requirements to see the systems we support and use for testing.

Get Composer

Install a recent stable version of Composer, the PHP command line dependency manager. Use the package manager for your Linux distribution. For example, on Ubuntu:

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apt-get install composer

To verify that you have the most recent stable version of Composer, you can run:

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composer -V

Install Composer locally

If you want to install Composer inside your project root directory only, follow the instructions for installing Composer in the current directory.

If you do so, you must replace composer with php -d memory_limit=-1 composer.phar in all commands below.

Install Ibexa DXP

Set up authentication tokens

Ibexa DXP subscribers have access to commercial packages at updates.ibexa.co. The site is password-protected. You must set up authentication tokens to access the site.

Log in to your service portal on support.ibexa.co, go to your Service Portal, and look for the following on the Maintenance and Support agreement details screen:

Authentication token

  1. Select Create token (this requires the Portal administrator access level).
  2. Fill in a label describing the use of the token. This will allow you to revoke access later.
  3. Save the password, you will not get access to it again!

Save the authentication token in auth.json to avoid re-typing it

Composer will ask whether you want to save the token every time you perform an update. If you prefer, you can decline and create an auth.json file globally in COMPOSER_HOME directory for machine-wide use:

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composer config --global http-basic.updates.ibexa.co <installation-key> <token-password>

To store your credentials per project, add the credentials to the COMPOSER_AUTH variable:

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export COMPOSER_AUTH='{"http-basic":{"updates.ibexa.co": {"username": "<your-key>", "password": "<your-password>"}}}'

You then need to add the contents of this variable to auth.json.

Different tokens for different projects on a single host

If you configure several projects on one machine, make sure that you set different tokens for each of the projects in their respective auth.json files.

After this, when running Composer to get updates, you will be asked for a username and password. Use:

  • as username - your Installation key found on the Maintenance and Support agreement details page in the service portal
  • as password - the token password you retrieved in step 3 above.

Authentication token validation delay

You can encounter some delay between creating the token and being able to use it in Composer. It might take up to 15 minutes.

Support agreement expiry

If your Support agreement expires, your authentication token(s) will no longer work. They will become active again if the agreement is renewed, but this process may take up to 24 hours. (If the agreement is renewed before the expiry date, there will be no disruption of service.)

Create project

To use Composer to instantly create a project in the current folder with all the dependencies, run the following command:

Using PHP 8.3 (recommended)

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composer create-project ibexa/headless-skeleton .
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composer create-project ibexa/experience-skeleton .
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composer create-project ibexa/commerce-skeleton .
Using PHP 8.2 or older

If you are using PHP 8.2 or any older version, use a different set of commands:

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composer create-project ibexa/headless-skeleton --no-install .
composer update
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composer create-project ibexa/experience-skeleton --no-install .
composer update
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composer create-project ibexa/commerce-skeleton --no-install .
composer update

Authentication token

If you added credentials to the COMPOSER_AUTH variable, at this point add this variable to auth.json (for example, by running echo $COMPOSER_AUTH > auth.json).

Tip

You can set different version constraints: specific tag (3.3.2), version range (~3.3.2), stability (^3.3@rc), etc.:

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composer create-project ibexa/experience-skeleton:3.3.2 .

Platform.sh

If you are deploying your installation on Platform.sh, run the following command:

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composer ibexa:setup --platformsh

This command provides the necessary configuration for using Platform.sh.

Add project to version control

It is recommended to add your project to version control. Initiate your project repository:

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git init; git add . > /dev/null; git commit -m "init" > /dev/null

Change installation parameters

At this point configure your database via the DATABASE_URL in the .env file, depending of the database you are using:

DATABASE_URL=mysql://user:password@host:port/database_name.

or

DATABASE_URL=postgresql://user:password@host:port/database_name.

Encoding database password

The password entered in DATABASE_URL must either be URL encoded, or not contain any special characters that would require URL encoding.

For more information, see Encoding database password.

Add entropy to improve cryptographic randomness

Choose a secret and provide it in the APP_SECRET parameter in .env. It should be a random string, made up of at least 32 characters, numbers, and symbols. This is used by Symfony when generating CSRF tokens, encrypting cookies, and for creating signed URIs when using ESI (Edge Side Includes).

Caution

The app secret is crucial to the security of your installation. Be careful about how you generate it, and how you store it. Here's one way to generate a 64 characters long, secure random string as your secret, from command line:

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php -r "print bin2hex(random_bytes(32));"

Do not commit the secret to version control systems, or share it with anyone who does not strictly need it. If you have any suspicion that the secret may have been exposed, replace it with a new one. The same goes for other secrets, like database password, Varnish invalidate token, JWT passphrase, etc.

After changing the app secret, make sure that you clear the application cache and log out all the users. For more information, see Symfony documentation.

It is recommended to store the database credentials in your .env.local file and not commit it to the Version Control System.

In DATABASE_VERSION you can also configure the database server version (for a MariaDB database, prefix the value with mariadb-).

Using PostgreSQL

If you want an installation with PostgreSQL instead of MySQL or MariaDB, refer to Using PostgreSQL.

Install and configure a search engine

You may choose to replace the default search engine with either Solr or Elasticsearch.

Follow How to set up Solr search engine to install Solr.

Do the following steps to enable Elasticsearch:

  1. Download and install Elasticsearch
  2. Verify that the Elasticsearch instance is up
  3. Set the default search engine
  4. Configure the search engine
  5. Push the templates

Configure the following parameter in the .env file:

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ELASTICSEARCH_DSN=http://localhost:9200

Create a database

Install Ibexa DXP and create a database with:

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php bin/console ibexa:install
php bin/console ibexa:graphql:generate-schema

Before executing the command make sure that the database user has sufficient permissions.

If Composer asks for your token, you must log in to your GitHub account and generate a new token (edit your profile and go to Developer settings > Personal access tokens > Generate new token with default settings). This operation is performed only once, when you install Ibexa DXP for the first time.

Run post-installation script

Run the post-installation script with the following command:

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composer run post-install-cmd

Use PHPs built-in server

For development you can use the built-in PHP server.

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php -S 127.0.0.1:8000 -t public

Your PHP web server will be accessible at http://127.0.0.1:8000

You can also use Symfony CLI:

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symfony serve

Prepare installation for development

Consider adding the Symfony DebugBundle which fixes memory outage when dumping objects with circular references. The DebugBundle contains the VarDumper and its Twig integration.

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composer require --dev symfony/debug-bundle

For detailed information about request treatment, you can also install Symfony Profiler:

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composer require --dev symfony/profiler-pack

To get both features in one go use:

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composer require --dev symfony/debug-pack

Configure an HTTP server

To use Ibexa DXP with an HTTP server, you need to set up directory permissions and prepare a virtual host.

Set up permissions

For development needs, the web user can be made the owner of all your files (for example with the www-data web user):

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chown -R www-data:www-data <your installation directory>

Directories var and public/var must be writable by CLI and the web server user. Future files and directories created by these two users will need to inherit those permissions.

Caution

For security reasons, in production, the web server cannot have write access to other directories than var. Skip the step above and follow the link below for production needs instead.

You must also make sure that the web server cannot interpret the files in the var directory through PHP. To do so, follow the instructions on setting up a virtual host below.

To set up permissions for production, it is recommended to use an ACL (Access Control List). See Setting up or Fixing File Permissions in Symfony documentation for information on how to do it on different systems.

Set up virtual host

Prepare a virtual host configuration for your site.

You can copy the example vhost file to /etc/apache2/sites-available as a .conf file and modify it to fit your project.

Specify /<your installation directory>/public as the DocumentRoot and Directory, or ensure BASEDIR is set in the environment. Uncomment the line that starts with #if [APP_ENV] and set the value to prod or dev, depending on the environment that you are configuring, or ensure APP_ENV is set in the environment.

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SetEnvIf Request_URI ".*" APP_ENV=prod

When the virtual host file is ready, enable the virtual host and disable the default:

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a2ensite ibexa
a2dissite 000-default.conf

Finally, restart the Apache server. The command may vary depending on your Linux distribution. For example, on Ubuntu use:

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service apache2 restart

You can use this example vhost file and modify it to fit your project. You will also need the ibexa_params.d files that should reside in a subdirectory below where the main file is, as is shown here.

Specify /<your installation directory>/public as the root, or ensure BASEDIR is set in the environment. Ensure APP_ENV is set to prod or dev in the environment, depending on the environment that you are configuring, and uncomment the line that starts with #if[APP_ENV.

When the virtual host file is ready, enable the virtual host and disable the default. Finally, restart the nginx server. The command may vary depending on your Linux distribution.

Open your project in the browser by visiting the domain address, for example http://localhost:8080. You should see the welcome page.

Post-installation steps

Security checklist

See the Security checklist for a list of security-related issues you should take care of before going live with a project.

Enable Date-based Publisher

To enable delayed publishing of Content using the Date-based Publisher, you must set up cron to run the bin/console ibexa:scheduled:run command periodically.

For example, to check for publishing every minute, add the following script:

echo '* * * * * cd [path-to-ibexa-dxp]; php bin/console ibexa:cron:run --quiet --env=prod' > ezp_cron.txt

For 5-minute intervals:

echo '*/5 * * * * cd [path-to-ibexa-dxp]; php bin/console ibexa:cron:run --quiet --env=prod' > ezp_cron.txt

Next, append the new cron to user's crontab without destroying existing crons. Assuming the web server user data is www-data:

crontab -u www-data -l|cat - ezp_cron.txt | crontab -u www-data -

Finally, remove the temporary file:

rm ezp_cron.txt

To make use of the Link Manager.

Ibexa Cloud

If you want to host your application on Ibexa Cloud, follow the Install on Ibexa Cloud procedure.