15. Installing Snipe-IT
15.1. Motivation, prerequisites and plan
Motivation
Snipe-IT is an ambitious piece of web-based software which allows users to track IT assets.
It uses PHP for its back end, as well as various frameworks that run on top of PHP. It also requires installation and configuration of the apache web server, as well as a MySQL database.
We want to come up with a procedure that lets us prepare virtual machines (VMs) with Snipe-IT. Apart from the usefulness of Snipe-IT (which might not be for everybody), this will illustrate how one sets up a complex web server.
Prerequisites
Prepare a machine to run Snipe-IT. This can be done on any machine, but it’s useful to do this on a brand new VM.
To make this VM you can follow the procedure in Section 10, specifically the “unattended Ubuntu installation” Section 10.6.2.
Plan
I will illustrate what I think is the most robust installation procedure, and then show two of the procedures from the official Snipe-IT installation instructions. These last two try to do it all with a single instruction, but they are not robust and it ends up being difficult to fix the problems that come up.
15.2. The procedure that works most robustly
The most robust procedure is from the Ceos3c Tutorials. It’s called “How to install LAMP on Ubuntu 16.04” and can be found at https://www.ceos3c.com/open-source/install-lamp-ubuntu-16-04/
This will have us take two steps: first install the LAMP stack, and then install Snipe-IT itself. Before we start, for good measure, let us upgrade our system.
Log in to the VM, for example with ssh ubuntu@192.168.122.NUMBER
Remember that the procedure in Section 10.6.2 sets
login and password to “ubuntu”. You should change these for
deployment, of course, but for now just ssh in to the VM with that
account.
In this tutorial I will use “ubuntu” as login and password to the GNU/Linux host, and “snipeit” as the login and password for everything else (mostly for the MySQL database).
First, for good measure, run:
sudo apt update -y && sudo apt dist-upgrade -y
sudo apt install -y wget curl git openssh-server
Then follow the steps in the next sections.
15.2.1. Installing the LAMP stack
LAMP used to stand for “Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl”. Today Perl has fallen out of favor as a back end language, but the acronym still works because in many applications it has been replaced by PHP, so the initials still work.
Installing the LAMP stack is the prerequisite for many packages, including this one.
We will follow the instructions here:
https://www.ceos3c.com/open-source/install-lamp-ubuntu-16-04/
and I will reproduce them here, but with a bit less explanation. You should definitely follow the tutorial at least once to see some of their extra explanations.
sudo apt-get install apache2
the tutorial now wants you to verify that the apache2 installation was
successful by bringing up http://localhost/ in a browser. At this
time you are probably running the browser from your main host, not
from the VM, so it will not see localhost. You can verify it with the
terminal-based browser lynx with lynx http://localhost/ and see if
you get the generic apache greeting page.
Continue installing:
sudo apt install mysql-server
For now, to make this procedure quick and reproducible, use “snipeit” for login and password in the MySQL setup questions.
Then secure it with
sudo mysql_secure_installation
## and answer with: snipeit, N, N, Y, Y, Y, Y
Now install PHP:
sudo apt-get install -y php libapache2-mod-php php-mysql php-curl php-gd php-intl php-pear php-imagick php-imap php-mcrypt php-memcache php-pspell php-recode php-sqlite3 php-tidy php-xmlrpc php-xsl php-mbstring php-gettext
and restart apache2 with:
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
To test PHP put this single line into /var/www/html/phpinfo.php:
<?php phpinfo(); ?>
You can now test it again with lynx http://localhost/phpinfo.php
to see if PHP is properly set up.
We’re done with the LAMP stack installation.
15.2.2. Installing Snipe-IT with the Coes3c Tutorial procedure
Now return to the main procedure in https://www.ceos3c.com/cloud/how-to-install-snipeit-on-ubuntu-16-04-on-aws-free-tier/
We go in as root and run the following commands to install composer and download snipe-it from github:
sudo -i
curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer
cd /var/www
git clone https://github.com/snipe/snipe-it snipeit
cd snipeit/
cp .env.example .env
Next we configure the MySQL database. Remembering that at this time
we have set the password to snipeit, enter the client with:
$ mysql -u root -p
mysql> create database snipeit;
mysql> CREATE USER 'snipeit'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'snipeit';
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON snipeit.* TO 'snipeit'@'localhost';
mysql> flush privileges;
mysql> exit
Now that the database is ready we connect the Snipe-IT software to the
database via the .env file.
Edit /var/www/snipeit/.env and only change these fields:
APP_URL becomes your IP address, for example 192.168.122.NUMBER
DB_DATABASE becomes snipeit
DB_USERNAME becomes snipeit
DB_PASSWORD becomes snipeit
and that’s everything you need to do here.
Note
We have left the DB_HOST to 127.0.0.1 (which is the same as
localhost) instead of changing it to the IP address. Why do we
sometimes use the full IP address and sometimes we’re OK with
localhost? Here’s the distinction: when Snipe-IT talks to it’s
MySQL database, we’re guaranteed that it’s on the same host, so
localhost is fine. Instead when we configure apache2 we will
want it to be available from outside, so we will use the full IP
address.
Now let’s finalize some permissions. Remembering that we are still root, let’s type:
chown -R www-data:www-data storage public/uploads
chmod -R 775 storage
chmod -R 755 public/uploads
Some more PHP:
apt-get install -y git unzip php php-mcrypt php-curl php-mysql php-gd php-ldap php-zip php-mbstring php-xml
apt-get install php7.0-bcmath
Now the very lengthy step of installing composer. This will
grab a bunch of other necessary stuff.
composer install --no-dev --prefer-source
Look closely at the output when this finishes, and scroll back up. One of the packages that gets downloaded is psysh, and this one takes so long that it sometimes times out. There is a way to lengthen the timeout, but I have not yet written it up.
Now generate your key with:
php artisan key:generate
## type yes when asked. Save the key somewhere, though it will
## also be pasted into your .env file.
The last thing we need to do is set up the apache2 configuration. We
will edit the file
/etc/apache2/sites-available/snipeit.example.com.conf and put this
content in it:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
<Directory /var/www/snipeit/public>
Require all granted
AllowOverride All
</Directory>
DocumentRoot /var/www/snipeit/public
ServerName YOURSERVERIP
#Redirect permanent / https://snipeit.your-server-fqdn.com/
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/snipeIT.error.log
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>
where the only thing you must change is YOURSERVERIP is your VM’s IP address, for example in a virt-manager situation it could be 192.168.122.NUMBER
Last few apache commands:
sudo a2ensite snipeit.example.com.conf
sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo systemctl restart apache2
## disable the default.conf
sudo a2dissite 000-default.conf
sudo service apache2 restart
## now look at apache2's ``sites-available`` area:
cd /etc/apache2/sites-available
## rename the default.conf to keep it as a backup
sudo cp 000-default.conf 000-default.confTEMP
## remove it
sudo rm 000-default.conf
## final apache/php commands:
sudo phpenmod mcrypt
sudo phpenmod mbstring
sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo service apache2 restart
From here on it’s all done with the web browser GUI. On your main
host open a browser window to the URL http://YOURIPADDRESS/ (for
example http://192.168.122.NUMBER/ )
And we’re done with this procedure: the GUI should be self-explanatory.
15.3. [obsolete] Installing Snipe-IT on debian/ubuntu
https://www.howtoforge.com/tutorial/how-to-install-snipe-it-on-debian-9/
https://www.tecmint.com/install-snipe-it-asset-management-on-centos-ubuntu-debian/
15.4. [obsolete] Preparing a bootable ISO
Some links:
https://access.redhat.com/discussions/1422213
http://www.frankreimer.de/?p=522
https://www.golinuxhub.com/2017/05/how-to-create-customized-bootable-boot.html
http://www.smorgasbork.com/2012/01/04/building-a-custom-centos-6-kickstart-disc-part-1/
http://www.smorgasbork.com/2012/01/04/building-a-custom-centos-7-kickstart-disc-part-2/