Koha is an open-source integrated library system for managing libraries. NixOS is a Linux distribution that is built around the Nix package manager. In this tutorial, we will learn how to install Koha on the latest version of NixOS.
Before we start installing Koha, let's update the system to ensure that we have the latest package definitions and security patches.
sudo nix-channel --update
sudo nixos-rebuild switch
Koha requires a database to store its data. We will use PostgreSQL, a free and open-source relational database management system. We can install PostgreSQL using the Nix package manager with the following command:
sudo nix-env -iA nixos.postgresql
Next, let's create a user and database for Koha. We will call the user kohaadmin
.
sudo su postgres
createuser -U postgres -d -e -E -l -P kohaadmin
createdb -U postgres -O kohaadmin kohadata
psql -U postgres -c "ALTER USER kohaadmin SET search_path = opac, public, koha_library;"
exit
We can now install Koha using the Nix package manager. We will use the package from the Koha community website.
sudo nix-env -iA nixos.koha
Now that we have installed Koha, we need to configure it to use the PostgreSQL database that we created earlier. Let's open the koha-conf.xml
file with an editor.
sudo vi /etc/koha/koha-conf.xml
Find the <database>
section and edit it to look like this:
<database name="kohadata">
<driver>DBI:Pg:dbname=kohadata;host=localhost</driver>
<user>kohaadmin</user>
<pass>password</pass>
</database>
Replace password
with the password that you set for kohaadmin
.
Save the changes and exit the editor.
We are now ready to start Koha.
sudo koha-start-zebra
sudo koha-start-zebra-queue
sudo koha-start-all
Koha should now be running and accessible on port 8080. Open a web browser and go to http://localhost:8080/
.
In this tutorial, we learned how to install and configure Koha on the latest version of NixOS. We hope that this tutorial was helpful and that you can now start managing your library with Koha.
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