Installing Manifold on Centos/RHEL: Download & Install Package
The most recent Manifold CentOS release is 5.1.3. To install previous releases, grab the apprporiate URL from the downloads page.
The following instructions have only been tested on CentOS 7, but we expect this RPM to work just fine on RHEL7.
Installation Prerequisites
-
Manifold should be installed on a virtual or physical server with at least 1 CPU and 6 GB of RAM (8GB preferred).1 We’ve had good luck installing Manifold on Google Cloud Compute instances, AWS EC2 instances, and Digital Ocean droplets.
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You will need to have root access to the server and the ability to shell into the server.
-
Your server should have a fully qualified domain name (FQDN). If the hostname is setup correctly, the installer should detect it and configure manifold accordingly. If it’s not, you can set the hostname manually in
/etc/manifold/manifold.rb
and reconfigure the application. Reconfiguration is discussed below.
Installation Process
via YUM Repository
1. Select and add a repository
Manifold offers two tracks to receive packages from, release
and devel
.
For production-ready, official releases, add the following yum repository as root (or via sudo
). Most people will choose this one.
curl -O /etc/yum.repos.d/manifold-release.repo https://storage.cloud.google.com/manifold-yum/el7/x86_64/release/manifold-release.repo
To include official release candidates along with official releases, you can add the following instead:
curl -O /etc/yum.repos.d/manifold-devel.repo https://storage.googleapis.com/manifold-yum/el7/x86_64/devel/manifold-devel.repo
Note: You should not add both tracks.
2. Install the package
Once the correct repository is in place:
yum install manifold
via Manual RPM
1. Download the Package
Shell into the server as root and download the most recent package.
cd ~
curl -O https://storage.googleapis.com/manifold-dist/centos7/manifold-5.1.3-1.el7.x86_64.rpm
2. Install the Package
Install the RPM package.
cd ~
rpm -ivh manifold-5.1.3-1.el7.x86_64.rpm
Apply Minimal Configuration
The package installer creates a file at /etc/manifold/manifold.rb
. Use this file to configure and manage the various services that Manifold is composed of. After changing this file, you’ll need to run sudo manifold-ctl reconfigure
from the command line so that Manifold picks up the changes and regenerates various configuration files based on the new settings.
For now, let’s just make sure Manifold is on the right domain. Open /etc/manifold/manifold.rb
in your preferred text editor (nano, vi, etc.) and look for the external_url
setting near the top of the file. Set this to the fully qualified domain name of your Manifold installation, then reconfigure Manifold with the following command. You may be prompted to accept the license. You can scroll through the licenses by pressing space, or “q” to exit the license view. You will need to accept the licenses before proceeding with the installation.
/usr/local/bin/manifold-ctl reconfigure
Once this process is complete, visit the fully qualified domain name in your browser. You should see an empty Manifold home page.
If everything looks good, proceed to the next step.
Notes
1 We advise against attempting to install Manifold in a shared hosting environment for security and stability reasons. Manifold consists of a number of distinct services, each of which requires RAM to function correctly. On a small VM with less than 6GB of RAM, you will likely need to enable swap memory or risk consuming all available memory.