Community Edition

Package configuration

The last step to your OpenProject installation is the configuration wizard. It will set up the connection to a database and configure the application according to your environment.

The OpenProject installation wizard currently supports the automatic setup for MySQL databases only. However, OpenProject itself supports both MySQL and PostgreSQL. To configure the package to use an existing database, see the section below. To install or configure a MySQL database, skip to Configuration.

The OpenProject package is configured through ENV parameters that are passed to the openproject user. You can read the current ENV parameters with openproject run env. To write/read individual parameters, use openproject config:set PARAMETER=VALUE and openproject config:get PARAMETER.

For instance if you wanted to change the session store you would do:

sudo openproject config:set SESSION_STORE=active_record_store

This is handy to configure options that are not available in the installer (yet). In most cases though, you should always try to configure the application first.

Configuring for an existing a PostgreSQL database

The MySQL wizard of the OpenProject installer internally sets the DATABASE_URL (See DATABASE_URL in the Rails Guides for more information).

You can set this DATABASE_URL parameter yourself to either a MySQL or PostgreSQL database URL.

openproject config:set DATABASE_URL="postgresql://[user[:password]@][host][:port][/dbname][?param1=value1&...]

Then, when configuring the addon, select skip in the MySQL installation wizard. The database specified using the URL will be used by Rails automatically for preparing the database.

You can use these ENV parameters to customize OpenProject. See OpenProject Configuration.

Package configuration

After the installation of the OpenProject package the system has to be configured to use this package and operate the OpenProject application. Therefore the package includes a configuration wizard which can be started using the following command:

openproject configure

Side note: The installer supports the configuration of necessary SSL connections too. If required the corresponding SSL certificates (incl. keys) have to be placed somewhere on the machine before running the installer (or reconfigure the application later to enable the SSL support).

After you have completed the configuration wizard, the OpenProject instance will be started automatically. You can log into the instance initially with the user/password combination admin/admin. You will be asked to change this password immediately after the first login.

Managing your OpenProject installation

The openproject package comes with a command line tool to help manage the application. To see all possible command options of this tool you can run:

admin@openproject-demo:~# sudo openproject
Usage:
  openproject run COMMAND [options]
  openproject scale TYPE=NUM
  openproject logs [--tail|-n NUMBER]
  openproject config:get VAR
  openproject config:set VAR=VALUE
  openproject reconfigure

In the rest of this section we'll go over some of the most important commands.

Run commands like rake tasks or rails console

The openproject command line tool supports running rake tasks and known scripts like the rails console:

sudo openproject run console
# or a rake task
sudo openproject run rake db:migrate
# or check the version of ruby used by openproject
sudo openproject run ruby -v

Show logs

The command line tool can also be used to see the log information. The most typically use case is to show/follow all current log entries. This can be accomplished using the the –tail flag. See example below:

sudo openproject logs --tail

You can also find all the logs in /var/log/openproject/.

Reconfigure the application

At any point in time, you can reconfigure the whole application by re-running the installer with the following command:

sudo openproject reconfigure

The command above will bring up the installation wizard again. Please be aware that it will start the configuration/installation process from scratch. You can choose to modify existing entries, or just leave them as they are if you want to reuse them (note that passwords will appear as "blank" entries in their respective input fields, but you don't need to enter them again if don't want to modify them).

Note that if you've just updated your OpenProject version, you should run openproject configure (see section below), which would automatically reuse your previous configuration, and only asks for your input if new configuration options are available.

Inspect the existing configuration

You can list all of the environment variables accessible to the application by running:

sudo openproject config
# this will return something like:
DATABASE_URL=mysql2://openproject:9ScapYA1MN7JQrPR7Wkmp7y99K6mRHGU@127.0.0.1:3306/openproject
SECRET_TOKEN=c5aa99a90f9650404a885cf5ec7c28f7fe1379550bb811cb0b39058f9407eaa216b9b2b22d27f58fb15ac21adb3bd16494ebe89e39ec225ef4627db048a12530
ADMIN_EMAIL=mail@example.com
EMAIL_DELIVERY_METHOD=smtp
SMTP_DOMAIN=example.com
SMTP_HOST=smtp.example.com
SMTP_PASSWORD=mail
SMTP_PORT=25
SMTP_URL=smtp://mail:mail@smtp.example.com:25/example.com
SMTP_USERNAME=mail
SMTP_ENABLE_STARTTLS_AUTO=true
SMTP_AUTHENTICATION=plain
WEB_CONCURRENCY=2
WEB_TIMEOUT=15
RAILS_CACHE_STORE=memcache
SESSION_STORE=cache_store

Installing plugins

Note: this guide only applies if you've installed OpenProject using our DEB/RPM packages.

A number of plugins exist for use with OpenProject. Most plugins that are maintained by us are shipping with OpenProject, however there are several plugins contributed by the community.

Previously, using them in a packaged installation was not possible without losing your changes on every upgrade. With the following steps, you can now use third party plugins.

Note: We cannot guarantee upgrade compatibility for third party plugins nor do we provide support for them. Please carefully check whether the plugins you use are available in newer versions before upgrading your installation.

1. Add a custom Gemfile

If you have a plugin you wish to add to your packaged OpenProject installation, create a separate Gemfile with the Gem dependencies, such as the following:

group :opf_plugins do
  gem 'openproject-emoji', git: 'https://github.com/tessi/openproject-emoji.git', :branch => 'op-5-stable'
end

The group :opf_plugins is generally recommended, but only required for plugins with custom frontend code that is picked up by webpack and output into their respective bundles.

We suggest to store the Gemfile under /etc/openproject/Gemfile.custom, but the choice is up to you, just make sure the openproject user is able to read it.

2. Propagate the Gemfile to the package

You have to tell your installation to use the custom gemfile via a config setting:

openproject config:set CUSTOM_PLUGIN_GEMFILE=/etc/openproject/Gemfile.custom

3. Re-run the installer

To re-bundle the application including the new plugins, as well as running migrations and precompiling their assets, simply re-run the installer while using the same configuration as before.

openproject configure

Using configure will take your previous decisions in the installer and simply re-apply them, which is an idempotent operation. It will detect the Gemfile config option being set and re-bundle the application with the additional plugins.