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Update the CentOS install instructions perhaps?

Posted: Sun May 05, 2019 8:52 pm
by ecarlseen
I finally got TimeTrex mostly working on CentOS 7 (fresh install, nothing crazy), and the instructions are a complete trash fire. Here are some of the changes I had to make to get it to work. These are from memory, so hopefully I'm getting everything. Minor mistakes are almost assured, but with any luck this puts people on the right track or at least a functional one.

Apache does not seem to want to listen to IPv4 connections by default. I changed the "Listen 80" line in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf to:
Listen 0.0.0.0:80


The default version of PostgreSQL is not supported by the current version of TimeTrex. I installed the current version of PostgreSQL, which is 11.2. Seems to work OK so far, although I get aa warning at runtime. These commands assume you followed the existing instructions and installed and older version.
rpm -Uvh https://yum.postgresql.org/11/redhat/rh ... noarch.rpm
yum remove postgresql*
yum install postgresql11-server
yum install postgresql11-libs
yum install postgresql11-contrib
yum install php-pgsql
/usr/pgsql-11/bin/postgresql-11-setup initdb
/bin/systemctl restart httpd.service
systemctl enable postgresql-11.service
systemctl start postgresql-11.service

Database setup works the same way.


The PostgreSQL 11 pg_hba.conf file can be found here:
/var/lib/pgsql/11/data/pg_hba.conf

The new command to restart PostgreSQL 11 is:
systemctl start postgresql-11.service


The instructions for changing pg_hba.conf did not work for me. These did (pretty much the opposite of the changes requested). YMMV.
# ----------------------------------
# "local" is for Unix domain socket connections only
local all all peer
# IPv4 local connections:
host all all 127.0.0.1/32 md5
# IPv6 local connections:
host all all ::1/128 md5
# ----------------------------------


Timezone detection seems to be buggy, at least for my timezone (America/Los_Angeles) and crashes the database initialization routines. The OS timezone is set correctly and I had also set the timezone /etc/php.ini, but neither of these appeared to have any effect. Adding this line to the bottom of timetrex.ini.php (in the [other] section) made the problem go away:
system_timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

If you crash during database initialization, just drop and recreate the database.



Remaining isuses (not show-stoppers, but still annoying):

Re-enabling selinux enforcement breaks database connections.

I get the following message at the top of my screen when using TimeTrex:
WARNING: System stack components (PHP/POSTGRES8) are out of date and not supported with this version of TimeTrex-Debug! Please update them immediately.



Gripe section

There doesn't appear to be any real installation documentation whatsoever - no changelogs, no readme for the current version, no list of supported or unsupported PostgreSQL versions, PHP versions, etc. Incredibly unprofessional. If somebody wants to dumb down their install process and hide all of those details then that can be a wonderful thing but it has to actually, you know, work. When it doesn't, it's mind-bogglingly frustrating, and we're stuck just guessing. I know that TimeTrex provides the community edition in hopes of up-selling us one day. This is perfectly fine. But there is no way in heck I would actually spend money on something that's been a completely sloppy mess so far.



Anyway, I hope this saves some people some time and hassle!

Re: Update the CentOS install instructions perhaps?

Posted: Mon May 06, 2019 7:44 am
by mikeb
Thank you for your feedback. Unfortunately you caught us in a transitional period as we just recently released a new version of TimeTrex that requires PHP and PostgreSQL versions newer than what CentOS 7 offers and we are still in the process of updating the installation documentation. We will get a note on the CentOS instructions today though so other people aren't affected by this.