Download and installation

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.

Setting the locale for initial seed data

The OpenProject installer wizard will reuse the LOCALE environment variable to determine in which language the instance is seeded (Initial names for work package types, categories, status, etc.).

To override that value, set the locale to your lowercase two-digit country code, e.g., for German localization:

openproject config:set LOCALE="de"

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:

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

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.