Installing & Configuring IDS on Gentoo

I have long enjoyed John Moose’s Image Display System for creating online galleries of my digital photos. I’ve installed previous versions of it (and the things that it requires) on several different distributions over the years, and usually there has been something painful and annoying that I’ve had to do in order to get the whole thing working. Recently, I got fed up with living in RPM hell and installed Gentoo Linux. One of my first goals was getting the photo content online again as quickly as possible, and that meant a clean install of IDS. Thankfully, this installation is a pretty painless experience under Gentoo. It goes a little something like this…

Verify Perl Version

# perl --version

Your Perl installation should be >= 5.00503.

Build ImageMagick

We need to download and build ImageMagick and Image::Magick, which will allow Perl programs to talk to ImageMagick. This was one of the major difficulties in some of the earlier RedHat distributions that I messed with, but it’s a dream come true with Gentoo.

# emerge media-gfx/imagemagick
# emerge dev-perl/perlmagick

Build Some More Perl Goodies

We also need to download and build Image::Info. While we’re at it, I like to get Image::Size, which is not necessary for IDS to run, but is often very handy.

# emerge dev-perl/ImageInfo
# emerge dev-perl/ImageSize (while we’re at it, why not?)

Download IDS

You can download the latest version of IDS from http://ids.sourceforge.net/download.html.

Unpack it into your directory of preference, eg: /home/ids/.

# mkdir /home/ids/
# cp /home/mike/ids-0.82.tar.gz /home/ids
# tar zxvf /home/ids/ids-0.82.tar.gz

Obviously, you’ll want to adjust this to do what’s appropriate to your system and the version of IDS you downloaded.

Set Up Authentication

You probably don’t want the whole internet stopping by and messing around with your administrative interface, so setting up a little Apache authentication is in order. Apache gives us three choices: basic authentication, digest authentication, and database authentication. To keep things simple, and since we won’t need to be managing authentication for large numbers of users, we’ll limit ourselves to basic and digest at this time. If you get really motivated, you can always read up on how Apache does authentication.

Basic Authentication

Go find a safe directory and create the htpasswd file.

# htpasswd -c .htpasswd admin

Enter a password to go with the admin user, who will access the administrative CGI.

# cd /home/ids/admin
# cp .htaccess.sample .htaccess

Edit .htaccess to point to your .htpasswd file.

AuthUserFile /home/httpd/.htpasswd

Digest Authentication

We could also do digest authentication instead, since so it’s not quite as insecure as basic authentication.

# htdigest -c /home/httpd/.htdigest "IDS Administration" admin
# cd /home/ids/admin

Create a new .htaccess file from scratch.

AuthType Digest
AuthName "IDS Administration"
AuthDigestFile /home/httpd/.htdigest
require user admin

Note that digest mode authentication only works with newer browsers, eg Opera 4.0+, MSIE 5.0+, Mozilla 1.0.1+, Netscape 7+, and Amaya.

Edit Apache Configuration

Find and edit your apache configuration (/etc/apache/conf/commonapache.conf in my installation) appropriately. You need to make sure CGI’s can be executed in the IDS tree.

Alias /ids /home/ids
<Directory /home/ids>
    order allow,deny
    allow from all
    Options ExecCGI FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride AuthConfig
</Directory>

Restart apache to have it re-read the configuration.

# /etc/init.d/apache restart

Play time

Fire up a web browser and point it to http://yourdomain/ids/admin/. Then you can log in and start playing! A good place to get started, aptly enough, is http://ids.sourceforge.net/documentation/getting-started.html. Enjoy!