Installing the Crowd Apache Connector on Red Hat Linux

This page provides instructions on how to install the Crowd Apache connector on a computer using Red Hat Linux or one of its derivative distributions, such as CentOS or Oracle Linux. These instructions are part of the guide to integrating Crowd with Apache.

The intent of these instructions is to take you from a default OS installation to a working Apache/Subversion/Crowd integration as easily as possible. We assume a fresh installation. If you are an experienced Linux system administrator you need not follow these instructions to the letter.

1. Install the Prerequisite Packages

The Crowd Apache connector depends on several packages that are not part of the base Red Hat distribution, but are included in the RPMForge Repository. The easiest way to install them is to add the RPMForge Repository to yum and then use yum to install the required dependencies, as described below.

1. If you are using Red Hat 4, you may not have yum installed. In that case, please follow the instructions for installing it in this TechTrouts.com blog post.
2. Add the RPMForge Repository to yum.
   • On Red Hat 6:
     Red Hat 6

     wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.i686.rpm
     rpm -Uvh rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.i686.rpm
     

     Note: In the EL6 version of the rpmforge repositories, some of the packages we need are in the 'extras' repository, which is disabled by default. To enable it, edit the file /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmforge.repo, find the [rpmforge-extras] section and make sure that the "enabled" parameter is set to "1".
   • On Red Hat 5:
     Red Hat 5

     wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.1-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm
     rpm -Uvh rpmforge-release-0.5.1-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm
     

   • On Red Hat 4:
     Red Hat 4

     wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.1-1.el4.rf.i386.rpm
     rpm -Uvh rpmforge-release-0.5.1-1.el4.rf.i386.rpm
     

3. Use yum to install the required dependencies:

   yum install httpd mod_perl perl-SOAP-Lite perl-Cache-Cache perl-libwww-perl
   

4. If you want to integrate with Subversion, also do this:

   yum install subversion mod_dav_svn
   

2. Install the Crowd Apache Connector Packages

The Apache Crowd Connector consists of 3 RPMs.

1. Download the RPMs from the link below:
   • https://studio.plugins.atlassian.com/source/browse/~tarball=zip/CWDAPACHE/branches/1.x/RPMS/RPMS.zip
2. Install the RPMs as follows:
   • On Red Hat 6:
     Red Hat 6

     unzip RPMS.zip
     rpm -Uvh perl-Atlassian-Crowd-1.3-1.el6.atlassian.noarch.rpm
     rpm -Uvh perl-Apache-CrowdAuth-1.3-1.el6.atlassian.noarch.rpm
     rpm -Uvh perl-Apache-CrowdAuthz-1.3-1.el6.atlassian.noarch.rpm
     

   • On Red Hat 5:
     Red Hat 5

     unzip RPMS.zip
     rpm -Uvh perl-Atlassian-Crowd-1.3-1.el5.atlassian.noarch.rpm
     rpm -Uvh perl-Apache-CrowdAuth-1.3-1.el5.atlassian.noarch.rpm
     rpm -Uvh perl-Apache-CrowdAuthz-1.3-1.el5.atlassian.noarch.rpm
     

   • On Red Jat 4:
     Red Hat 4

     unzip RPMS.zip
     rpm -Uvh perl-Atlassian-Crowd-1.3-1.el4.atlassian.noarch.rpm
     rpm -Uvh perl-Apache-CrowdAuth-1.3-1.el4.atlassian.noarch.rpm
     rpm -Uvh perl-Apache-CrowdAuthz-1.3-1.el4.atlassian.noarch.rpm
     

3. Everything you need should now be installed. Restart Apache to make sure there are no errors:

   /etc/init.d/httpd restart
   

4. If Apache fails to start, check the /var/log/httpd/error_log file.

Now that the software is installed, the next step is to configure Apache authentication.