How to Install eLabFTW on Alpine Linux Latest

eLabFTW is an open-source laboratory notebook software designed to help researchers and scientists to organize their lab work. In this tutorial, we'll guide you through the steps to install eLabFTW on Alpine Linux latest version.

Step 1: Install Required Dependencies

Before you start the installation process, you must ensure that your system has all the necessary dependencies installed. These dependencies include:

nginx
php7
php7-fpm
php7-gd
php7-intl
php7-json
php7-mbstring
php7-mcrypt
php7-mysqli
php7-openssl
php7-pdo
php7-pdo_mysql
php7-session
php7-simplexml
php7-xml
php7-xmlwriter
php7-zip

To install these dependencies, you can use the following command:

apk add --no-cache nginx php7 php7-fpm php7-gd php7-intl php7-json php7-mbstring php7-mcrypt php7-mysqli php7-openssl php7-pdo php7-pdo_mysql php7-session php7-simplexml php7-xml php7-xmlwriter php7-zip

Step 2: Download eLabFTW

Visit https://www.elabftw.net/download/ to download the latest version of eLabFTW. Once the download has been completed, extract the files to a directory of your choice.

wget https://www.elabftw.net/files/release/elabftw-1.8.5.tar.gz
tar -xzvf elabftw-1.8.5.tar.gz

Step 3: Move the eLabFTW Files to Your Web Server

Move the extracted eLabFTW files to the web server directory. In this tutorial, we will be using the default web server directory for Alpine Linux, which is /usr/share/nginx/html.

mv elabftw-1.8.5 /usr/share/nginx/html/elabftw

Step 4: Configure Nginx

Next, configure nginx to serve the eLabFTW application. Open the nginx configuration file located at /etc/nginx/nginx.conf using a text editor of your choice, then add the following lines at the end of the server block:

location /elabftw {
  root /usr/share/nginx/html;
  index index.php;

  if (!-e $request_filename) {
    rewrite ^/elabftw/(.+)$ /elabftw/index.php/$1 last;
  }

  location ~ \.php$ {
    fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
    fastcgi_index index.php;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    include fastcgi_params;
  }
}

Save the configuration file, then reload nginx to apply the changes:

nginx -s reload

Step 5: Install and Configure MariaDB

Finally, eLabFTW requires a database to store the lab data. For this tutorial, we'll use MariaDB, but you can use any other database management system of your choice. Install MariaDB by running the following command:

apk add --no-cache mariadb mariadb-client

Next, start the MariaDB service and create a new database and user for eLabFTW:

/etc/init.d/mariadb start
mysql -u root -p
CREATE DATABASE elabftw_db;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON elabftw_db.* TO 'elabftw_user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
EXIT;

Step 6: Configure eLabFTW

Now, navigate to your eLabFTW installation page in a web browser. In this example, the URL would be http://localhost/elabftw/. You will be asked to configure eLabFTW.

Choose a name for your laboratory notebook and fill in the database information you created in step 5 (database name, username, and password). Leave all other settings as the default.

Complete the installation process by clicking on the "Install" button. You should now have successfully installed and set up eLabFTW on Alpine Linux.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we have shown you how to install eLabFTW on Alpine Linux. We hope this has been informative and that you have successfully installed and configured eLabFTW on your system.

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