How to Install OSQA in Ubuntu Server

June 4th, 2011

OSQA is questions and answers application built in Django. It’s open source StackOverflow clone.

While it has documentation about installing on Linux server, but here I just want to share my step to step instructions on installing OSQA in Ubuntu server.

Web Server

Install apache webserver and mod_wsgi module

sudo apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-wsgi

Database Server

Install mysql server.

sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client

Create new user with the password ‘osqa12′ (you can change whatever you like), create new database and grant the database access to the user

CREATE USER 'osqa'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'osqa12';
CREATE DATABASE osqa DEFAULT CHARACTER SET UTF8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
GRANT ALL ON osqa.* to 'osqa'@'localhost';

Ubuntu tools and libraries

This libraries and tools need to be installed in Ubuntu.

sudo apt-get install build-essential libmysqlclient15-dev python-dev python-setuptools
sudo easy_install pip

Installing OSQA

  • Before installing OSQA, please make sure you are in the directory where you want to put the application. For this tutorial we’ll have OSQA install into /home/qa

    cd /home/qa
  • Download OSQA 
    wget -c http://www.osqa.net/releases/fantasy-island-0.9.0-beta3.tar.gz
  • Extract OSQA 
    tar -xvf fantasy-island-0.9.0-beta3.tar.gz
  • Install requirement 
    sudo pip install mysql-python markdown html5lib south python-openid django
  • Rename local settings, and update your database credential and APP_URL 
    mv settings_local.py.dist settings_local.py

    Sample configuration for domain qa.com.

    DATABASE_NAME = 'osqa'
DATABASE_USER = 'osqa'
DATABASE_PASSWORD = 'osqa12'
DATABASE_ENGINE = 'mysql'
 
APP_URL = 'http://qa.com'
  • Change manage.py into executable for shortcut

    chmod +x manage.py
  • Create all database structure, and answer no for create super user 
    ./manage.py syncdb --all
  • Create fake migration for better update in the future 
    ./manage.py migrate forum --fake

Running OSQA in WSGI mode

  • Rename osqa.wsgi.dist and update the content 
    mv osqa.wsgi.dist osqa.wsgi
vim osqa

    Sample configuration :

    import os
import sys
sys.path.append('/home/qa')
sys.path.append('/home/qa/osqa')
# The first part of this module name should be identical to the directory name
# of the OSQA source.  For instance, if the full path to OSQA is
# /home/osqa/osqa-server, then the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE should have a value
# of 'osqa-server.settings'.
os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = 'osqa.settings'
import django.core.handlers.wsgi
application = django.core.handlers.wsgi.WSGIHandler()
  • create or edit virtual host for apache :
    vim /etc/apache2/sites-available/qa.com.conf

    <VirtualHost 75.102.27.243:80>
    SuexecUserGroup "#1000" "#1000"
 
    ServerName qa.com
    ServerAlias www.qa.com
 
    LogLevel info
 
    WSGIDaemonProcess qa.com display-name=%{GROUP}
    WSGIProcessGroup qa.com
    WSGIScriptAlias / /home/qa/osqa/osqa.wsgi
 
    Alias /m/ "/home/qa/osqa/forum/skins/"
    <Directory "/home/qa/osqa/forum/skins">
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Directory>
    Alias /upfiles/ "/home/qa/osqa/forum/upfiles/"
    <Directory "/home/qa/osqa/forum/upfiles">
        Order deny,allow
        Allow from all
    </Directory>
 
    ErrorLog /var/log/qa.com_error_log
    CustomLog /var/log/qa.com_access_log combined
    ServerSignature On
</VirtualHost>
  • Copy the configuration into /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/ 
    sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/qa.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/qa.conf
  • Restart apache

    sudo /etc/init.d/apache restart

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