Basics

Quick PEAR Usage Tutorial

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To find out what packages are installed, you can run a list:

pear list-all

To update the PEAR repositories:

pear channel-update pear.php.net

To install a package, for instance, XML_RPC:

pear download XML_RPC
pear install XML_RPC

Note on installations: you don’t always have to download the module first, but, on dedicated server environments where /tmp is mounted noexec, you may need to download the module first and then move the archive into another directory and install it manually.

If you don’t know the specific name of a PEAR module you want to install, you can search for it:

pear search <name>

To show your PEAR configuration variables:

pear config-show

To change variables:

pear config-set variable_name <value>

Install Ruby on Rails with cPanel

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Packaged in with cPanel 11 is a new Ruby installer that will seamlessly install and integrate Ruby in your system and cPanel.  To install, simple run this command:

/scripts/installruby

Once this is installed, you can test that it is functional by running:

ruby -v

If you’re more old-fashioned or are running a version of cPanel that does not have the installer, you can  find a manual installation tutorial here.

Installing Ruby on cPanel

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Here’s how to install Ruby on Rails on a cPanel system:

Update: These instructions were modified for Ruby 1.8.6, since 1.8.5 is no longer available!

First install Ruby:

wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz
tar -xvzf ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.8.6
./configure
make
make install

Now, install the Gems and Rails:

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/11289/rubygems-0.9.0.tgz
tar -xvzf rubygems-0.9.0.tgz
cd rubygems-0.9.0
ruby setup.rb
gem install rails

Install Fast CGI

wget fastcgi.com/dist/fcgi-2.4.0.tar.gz
tar -xvzf fcgi-2.4.0.tar.gz
cd fcgi-2.4.0
./configure
make
make install

wget fastcgi.com/dist/mod_fastcgi-2.4.2.tar.gz
tar -xvzf mod_fastcgi-2.4.2.tar.gz
cd mod_fastcgi-2.4.2
/usr/local/apache/bin/apxs -o mod_fastcgi.so -c *.c
/usr/local/apache/bin/apxs -i -a -n fastcgi mod_fastcgi.so
gem install fcgi

Edit the Apache config file and add the fcgi module:

pico /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf

LoadModule fastcgi_module libexec/mod_fastcgi.so
FastCgiIpcDir /tmp/fcgi_ipc/
AddHandler fastcgi-script .fcgi
< /IfModule>

Then restart Apache

Install RMagick and GetText:

wget http://umn.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/graphicsmagick/GraphicsMagick-1.1.7.tar.gz
tar -xvzf GraphicsMagick-1.1.7.tar.gz
cd GraphicsMagick-1.1.7
./configure
make
make install

Install MySQL for Ruby:

gem install mysql

Now make the test Installation. To do this, log in as your user (not root)

su user
cd ~
rails test
cd public_html
ln -s ../test/public/ rails
cd ../test/
chmod -Rf 777 tmp/
cd public
chmod 755 dispatch.fcgi
pico .htaccess

Now, find the line in the .htaccess that looks something like this:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.cgi [QSA,L]

And change “dispatch.cgi” to “dispatch.fcgi”

To see if you’ve installed everything properly, just browse to the Rails folder:

http://yourdomain.com/rails/

cPanel PEAR Installer Errors

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A new feature in cPanel 11/x3 is the PEAR module installer that allows users to install their own PEAR modules locally in their account.  I’ve heard that a lot of servers with existing PHP installations have had problems getting this to work, and instead are prompted with this error:

X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.3
Content-type: text/html

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING in /usr/local/cpanel/base/frontend/x3/module_installers/live_install.html on line 8

/usr/bin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/local/bin

As far as I know there are two causes for this problem:

1.  /usr/bin/php is missing or is not compiled with PEAR or CLI.  Some servers have a CGI and CLI binary installed, so you’ll need to symlink /usr/local/bin/php to /usr/bin/php:

ln -s /usr/local/bin/php /usr/bin/php

2.  Your PHP installation is compiled without CLI support (–disable-cli), which is common when compiling PHP as a CGI binary or for suPHP.  If you have an installation with CLI enabled you will need to link that binary to /usr/bin/php, otherwise compile a second copy with the command line interface enabled.

Disable Stats Programs for a User

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There are some cases where you may want to disable stats programs from running for certain users. To do so, open up their user file in /var/cpanel/users and add these lines:

STATGENS=WEBALIZER,AWSTATS,ANALOG
skipanalog=0
skipawstats=1
skipwebalizer=0

Of course, 1=yes and 0=no, and if the stats program is not enabled in the server it won’t run at all, regardless of whether it is enabled for a specific user.

Remove All Spam and Trash from Server

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A buildup of spam and trash in user accounts can occupy several gigs worth of space. To easily remove spam and trash from your users’ accounts, you can use the following commands:

Maildir/Courier-IMAP:

rm -rf /home/*/mail/*/*/.spam/*
rm -rf /home/*/mail/.spam/*
rm -rf /home/*/mail/*/*/.Trash/cur/*
rm -rf /home/*/mail/*/*/.Trash/new/*

CPPOP:

rm -rf /home/*/mail/*/*/spam
rm -rf /home/*/mail/spam
rm -rf /home/*/mail/INBOX.Trash
rm -rf /home/*/mail/*/*/INBOX.Trash

To delete the cPanel trash folders:

rm -rf /home/*/.trash/*

Upgrading ClamAV – cPanel

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Sometimes cPanel can be late with pushing out critical updates for third-party software. At the time of this writing, cPanel’s latest release of ClamAV is 0.91 which was determined to have a major security exploit, so all users are encouraged to update to 0.92. This upgrade guide assumes that you used cPanel’s plugin installer to successfully run ClamAV on your system.

cd /usr/local/cpanel/modules-install/clamavconnector-Linux-i686
wget http://freshmeat.net/redir/clamav/29355/url_tgz/clamav-0.92.tar.gz
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/clamav/clamav-0.92.tar.gz.sig
tar -xvzf clamav-0.92.tar.gz
wget http://missysadmin.com/files/clamav/install2
chmod 755 install2

You’ll need to check the 2nd and 3rd line in the install2 script to make sure they match the old and new versions of ClamAV.  To find the old version, run clamd –version.

AVV=0.92
AVVOLD=0.91.2

From here, just run ./install2 and let the installation run. You can confirm the upgrade by calling the binary with the version switch:

root@server [~]# clamd –version
ClamAV 0.91.2/5186/Wed Dec 19 22:38:25 2007

At this point it’s also a good idea to uncheck the ‘install and keep updated’ box for ClamAV in WHM.

Upgrading to Perl 5.8.8 – cPanel

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Perl 5.8.8 has a lot of improvements over 5.8.7, and is highly recommended for use on cPanel 11.  Upgrading is simple:

wget http://layer1.cpanel.net/perl588installer.tar.gz
tar xfvz perl588installer.tar.gz
cd perl588installer
./install

The [pretty much] Complete Guide to Installing ffMPEG and Audio Binaries

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I know you’ve provably seen a lot of guides on how to install ffMPEG, but I’ve noticed that most of them are incomplete and don’t cover the possible issues that can arise during installation. I’ve installed ffMPEG on dozens of servers and have devised a standardized procedure on what I feel is the best way to perform this installation.

This walkthrough has been tested on systems running Redhat 9, RHEL 4, and CentOS 4.5 and it may also work on other distributions and versions. Our servers also run cPanel 11, but this is in no way required in order to install ffMPEG. I assume at this point that you have root access and that yum (or another similar package manager) is installed.

ffMPEG commonly consists of and includes the following software:

– Essential / MPlayer
– FLVtool2 (Requires a Ruby Core)
– LAME MP3 Encoder
– php-ffMPEG
– ffMPEG
– libOgg
– libvorbis

To start out, enter into a temporary source directory and download all the binaries:

cd /usr/src
wget http://www3.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/essential-20061022.tar.bz2
wget http://www4.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/MPlayer-1.0rc2.tar.bz2
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/17497/flvtool2-1.0.6.tgz
wget http://easynews.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/lame/lame-3.97.tar.gz
wget http://superb-west.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/ffmpeg-php/ffmpeg-php-0.5.0.tbz2

*These are the latest stable versions at the time this article was written. If you are unable to download any of the above, you’ll need to visit the distributor’s site and download the latest stable version available.

Now extract everything:

bunzip2 essential-20061022.tar.bz2; tar xvf essential-20061022.tar
tar zxvf flvtool2-1.0.6.tgz
tar zxvf lame-3.97.tar.gz
bunzip2 ffmpeg-php-0.5.0.tbz2; tar xvf ffmpeg-php-0.5.0.tar
bunzip2 MPlayer-1.0rc2.tar.bz2 ; tar -xvf MPlayer-1.0rc2.tar

Create and import the Codecs directory:

mkdir /usr/local/lib/codecs/
mv essential-20061022/* /usr/local/lib/codecs/
chmod -Rf 755 /usr/local/lib/codecs/

Install Subversion and Ruby

yum install subversion
yum install ruby  (If you’re on cPanel you can alternatively use /scripts/installruby)
yum install ncurses-devel

Get ffMPEG and MPlayer from SVN:

svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer

Install LAME:

cd /usr/src/lame-3.97
./configure && make && make install

Install libOgg and libVorbis:

yum install libogg.i386
yum install libvorbis.i386
yum install libvorbis-devel.i386

Install flvtool2

cd /usr/src/flvtool2-1.0.6/
ruby setup.rb config
ruby setup.rb setup
ruby setup.rb install

Install MPlayer:

cd /usr/src/MPlayer-1.0rc2

Install ffMPEG:

cd /usr/src/ffmpeg/ ./configure –enable-libmp3lame –enable-libvorbis –disable-mmx –enable-shared make && make install

This is the typical configure line that I use, but you can customize this to what you need. For available configure options, type ./configure –help. Your custom configuration may require the installation of additional software on the server.

ln -s /usr/local/lib/libavformat.so.50 /usr/lib/libavformat.so.50 ln -s /usr/local/lib/libavcodec.so.51 /usr/lib/libavcodec.so.51 ln -s /usr/local/lib/libavutil.so.49 /usr/lib/libavutil.so.49 ln -s /usr/local/lib/libmp3lame.so.0 /usr/lib/libmp3lame.so.0 ln -s /usr/local/lib/libavformat.so.51 /usr/lib/libavformat.so.51

You may get an error about a library path not being found, if so, run

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib

If this is being installed on a dedicated server, you might also get an error about the /tmp directory not be executable, which is common when installing on a dedicated server with a separate /tmp partition mounted noexec. In this case, you will need to create a tmp dir in the ffmpeg folder and use that as the tmp disk for now:

mkdir tmp chmod 777 tmp export TMPDIR=./tmp

Then run the configure command and set the TMPDIR variable back.

export TMPDIR=/tmp

Install ffMPEG-php

cd /usr/src/ffmpeg-php-0.5.0/ phpize ./configure && make && make install ln -s /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg /usr/bin/ffmpeg ln -s /usr/local/bin/mplayer /usr/bin/mplayer

When the installation is complete, it will give you a long path to the shared libraries. This needs to be copied to the php.ini as so:

[ffmpeg] extension=/usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20020429/ffmpeg.so

or in most cases where the extension_dir variable is set, just do:

extension=”/ffmpeg.so”

The ‘no-debug-non-zts-xxxxxxxx’ directory will be the one provided during installation. When this is done, restart Apache and check that the module is loaded in PHP:

/etc/init.d/httpd restart php -r ‘phpinfo();’ | grep ffmpeg

Look for this:

ffmpeg
fmpeg support (ffmpeg-php) => enabled
ffmpeg-php version => 0.5.0
ffmpeg.allow_persistent => 0 => 0

If you only get output for the ‘PWD’ variables, make sure that the extension_dir path is correct in the phpinfo file. Sometimes there are two specified, and if that is the case then the incorrect one should be commented out.

Test out ffmpeg for errors just by typing ffmpeg at the command line. The most common error is:

ffmpeg: error while loading shared libraries: libavformat.so.51: cannot open…

To correct this, edit /etc/ld.so.conf and add the line

/usr/local/lib

then save and exit.

Now run this command to reload the library cache:

ldconfig -v

You’re all done…enjoy!

./configure && make && make install