make cpan fails, what can I do?make install exit with the error 'Missing or empty inst/bricolage.sql!'?make install exit with the error 'Unable to set bricolage.conf variable APACHE_BIN to ``/usr/local/apache/bin/httpd'''?make install exit with the error 'IDENT authentication failed for user ``postgres'''?<html><head></head></html> or nothing at all. There are no errors in the error log or the access log. What's wrong?
Bric::FAQ - Bricolage Frequently Asked Questions
$Revision: 1.42 $
$Date: 2004/05/05 02:27:05 $
This document tries to answer questions asked frequently on the mailing list or other questions that people might have when starting out with or evaluating Bricolage.
This section answers questions that someone evaluating Bricolage might have.
Currently only PostgreSQL support is maintained. There is an Oracle driver, but it's old and not known to work. A port to MySQL 4.1 is reportedly underway.
There is currently only a tentative start for a bricolage debian package. The location of the package is http://people.debian.org/~erich/bricolage.
To use this package, add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:
deb http://people.debian.org/~erich/bricolage /
Then update your package database and install bricolage using dselect or
standard apt-get commands.
As of this writing, the package downloads and installs all necessary packages, but you still need to read through the instructions in /usr/share/doc/bricolage/README.Debian to setup a usable Bricolage installation. Please also note that the debian package may be out-of-sync with the standard distribution.
There is currently an effort to make a KNOPPIX-style CD for Bricolage. Informally this CD is known as KNOPPIX with Bricolage. It is a CD that contains a Linux Distribution (Debian in this case) with Bricolage preinstalled. The system is self-contained on a CD and the user merely needs to boot an i386-compatible computer from the CD. The CD will not in any way alter the content of your hard disk. This CD is useful for evaluating Bricolage since it removes the hassle of installation. Although it is certainly possible to transfer the Bricolage installation on the CD to your hard disk, we do not expect this to be the standard procedure to install Bricolage after evaluation. Rather, it is better to download the Bricolage sources from sourceforge.net and install it.
The KNOPPIX with Bricolage CD is based on Erich Schubert's Debian package, and was created by Mark Jaroski as a demonstration of Bricolage. as Brico-Knoppix.
The CD is available here: http://www.geekhive.net/~mark/brico-knoppix-1.0.iso
As far as we know, no one has performed any benchmarks comparing Bricolage to other content management systems. But the performance of Bricolage is irrelevant to a public facing site. As a back office content management and publishing system, Bricolage does not host web sites or serve content. Rather, when documents are published in Bricolage, they are pushed through templates and the resulting files are distributed to your Web server. So if your Bricolage templates output static HTML, your public Web server should serve your content very fast indeed since performanc depends entirely on the scalability of your Web server.
The separation of the content management and publishing server from the front end Web server is one of the major strength of Bricolage:
Other advantages of Bricolage include:
It has received praise for being as good as or better than commercial alternatives. For example, see http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,652977,00.asp
Some that we know of are:
Yes. Kineticode, founded by Bricolage maintainer and lead developer David Wheeler, offers a range of technical support and templating support options, as well as Bricolage consulting services. Learn more at http://www.kineticode.com/services/.
You are very fortunate, because mod_perl 1.x is just not too stable as a DSO. Weird things tend to happen. That's not to say that some haven't set it up as a DSO and just had it work, but we've seen all sorts of unexplainable problems just evaporate when users have switched from a DSO to a static mod_perl. And it's not Bricolage so much as Mason where the problems are noticed. The Mason site (http://www.masonhq.com/) has a couple of FAQs that mention the issue:
You can also search the Mason Users list archives (http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/) and the mod_perl Users list archives (http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/) for some discussions of this issue.
This section contains questions about error messages output by Bricolage.
make cpan fails, what can I do?Bricolage depends heavily on CPAN modules. The purpose of make cpan is to
verify that the required CPAN modules exist and, if not, fetch and install
them from CPAN, whenever possible. In the worst case where it cannot handle
the an error automatically, it gives instruction on how to do it manually.
Usually, the instruction tell you to
perl -MCPAN -e shell look package::module perl Makefile.PL make make test make install
where package::module is the name of the file to look for.
Sometimes, it will exit with a error without telling you what to do. Read the
last few lines of the output. See which package::module caused the
error. Then manually install the module using the procedure outlined
above. If, when carrying out the procedures described above, make test
fails, you might still want to go ahead with make install
nonetheless. However, bear in mind that the module might not be installed
properly. After this, rerun make cpan.
For an example, at this writing (2 August 2003), Apache::ConfigFile can
cause a permission problem. make cpan will report a strings of
cannot set uid=88nnnn, gid=nnnnn
Read a few line before the error message to determine the actual location of
the download file, it is usually something like
/root/.cpan/sources/authors/id/N/NW/NWIGER/Apache-ConfigFile-0.14.gz. cd
into the /root/.cpan/sources/authors/id/N/NW/NWIGER/ directory and untar
the tar.gz file:
tar -zxvf Apache-ConfigFile-0.14.tar.gz
You will get the same error messages. Note, however, that untar is successful
and the directory Apache-ConfigFile-0.14 is created. cd into this
directory and run
perl Makefile.PL make make test make install
This should succeed. After this, rerun make cpan again. More information
can be founded in http://bugzilla.bricolage.cc/show_bug.cgi.
Sometimes, make cpan reports that a CPAN module is not found. This could be
because it is trying to get an older version of the CPAN module which CPAN no
longer hosts because your CPAN index file is out-of-date and needs to be
refreshed. To refresh your CPAN index file,
perl -MCPAN -e 'reload index'
and repeat make cpan.
Sometimes you might need to update your CPAN bundle, itself:
perl -MCPAN -e 'install Bundle::CPAN'
make install exit with the error 'Missing or empty inst/bricolage.sql!'?You downloaded Bricolage from CVS and didn't run make dist. Do something
like this:
# make dist
[lots of output...]
# cd bricolage-1.5.0
# make install
make install exit with the error 'Unable to set bricolage.conf variable APACHE_BIN to ``/usr/local/apache/bin/httpd'''?Most likely it's because you're installing Bricolage on Red Hat 8 or later and
haven't got 'round to reading README.RedHat. In fact, a fair number of Perl
modules will fail to install or test properly with Perl 5.8 on Red Hat 8. This
is because Red Hat is configured such that it defaults to a Unicode character
set. Bricolage prefers this, of course, since all Bricolage data is stored in
the database in Unicode. However, it does require that you set the LANG
environment variable on Red Hat 8, like this:
export LANG=en_US
From what we've heard, LANG must not include ``utf8''. Presumably you should
set LANG to a value for your local language. At any rate, you'll need to
make sure that this is set in your shell in order to install Bricolage and all
of its modules, and you may need to include it in your httpd.conf file, as
well:
PerlSetEnv LANG en_US
We've also heard that you can set the LANG environment variable globally in the /etc/sysconfig/i18n file. Then you wouldn't need to worry about it anywhere else.
make install exit with the error 'IDENT authentication failed for user ``postgres'''?I'm not sure why the IDENT fails. In inst/db_grant.pl, we switch EUID to that of 'postgres'. Maybe more things need to be set in order to convince postgresql that you're logging in as 'postgres' instead of 'root'?
I worked around the problem by ignoring it; in pg_hba.conf,
#local all all ident sameuser #host all all 127.0.0.1 255.0.0.0 ident sameuser local all all trust host all all 127.0.0.1 255.0.0.0 trust host all all 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 reject
A Short introduction to pg_hba.conf can be found in Bric::DBA, and it is more thoroughly documented at http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/interactive/client-authentication.html.
[error] [client 127.0.0.1] Error executing AccessHandler: Bric::App::Session -- /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.0/Bric/App/Session.pm -- 236 Difficulties tie'ing the session hash to file '/tmp/bricolage/session'
Most likely it is because one or more files or directories in your Bricolage
temp directory are no longer writable by the Apache user. You need to chown
the temp file directories and restart Bricolage:
sudo chown -R nobody:nobody /tmp/bricolage sudo bric_apachectl restart
<html><head></head></html> or nothing at all. There are no errors in the error log or the access log. What's wrong?I've seen this a couple of times, but the cause was different each time. On one occasion, there was a FilesMatch directive in a separate VirtualHost directive in httpd.conf that was preventing Mason from seeing any of the Bricolage UI components. The directive that caused the problem looked like this:
<FilesMatch "\.mas">
SetHandler perl-script
PerlHandler Bric::App::Handler
</FilesMatch>
I have no idea why this would have caused a problem, but when it was removed, Bricolage started working again.
On another occasion, a user noticed that the files comp/login/dhandler and
comp/login/welcome.html were empty. This caused the equivalent of a
``Document Contains No Data'' error, only it didn't. In fact, in my tests, under
these circumstances, the browser had no HTML source at all (although I was
later told that a Mozilla setting can force the <html><head></head></html>
>> to be added). At any rate, the problem was fixed by reinstalling Bricolage
(a C<make upgrade> would probably do the trick, too), but it's likely that
simply copying these two files from the Bricolage source directories to your
installed component root will correct the problem. Holler on the
bricolage-general mail list if it doesn't.
Look in your Apache error_log file. If you find an error along the lines of
cannot login ...
Then you need to update your pg_hba.conf file as described in the section
Why does make install exit with the following error?. In fact, as
David Wheeler suggested in one of the email in the bricolage-general
mailing list, if you issue the following command on the command line:
/usr/local/pgsql/bin/pgsql -U bric bric
you will get
IDENT authentication failed for user "bric"
Thus demonstrating that you're dealing with a PostgreSQL configuration issue, rather than a Bricolage issue.
This is a known issue with PostgreSQL's pg_dump utility -- it's not smart
enough to handle circular dependencies. The PostgreSQL developers are aware of
the issue. See this bug report for details:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-bugs/2002-09/msg00278.php.
In the meantime, the workaround is to edit your SQL dump file so that the
Bricolage database will load properly. In your SQL dump file, search for and
remove the line containing the string 'CONSTRAINT ``ck_usr__login'''. This
should remove the creation of the constraint that uses the login_avail()
function before the function is created. Next, go to the very end of the
SQL dump file and add these lines:
ALTER TABLE usr ADD CONSTRAINT ck_usr__login CHECK (login_avail(LOWER(login), active, id));
This will add the constraint at the very end of the load, when both the ``usr''
table and the login_avail() function have been created. Now you should be
able to load the database and get back to work!
This is a bug with Perl. It is caused by the presence of Unicode in a Mason template, and dates from a period when Perl's regular expressions had some difficulty with Unicode. It was fixed in Perl 5.8.1. Upgrade to the latest version of Perl and you should be good to go.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you're using Safari 1.1.1 or earlier on Mac OS X. Prior to the release of version 1.2, Safari has a JavaScript bug wherein it doesn't know the name of a window. The ``Click here to start'' link opens a new named window, but since Safari doesn't know that it's named, Bricolage's JavaScript can't tell that it's named, either, and so keeps trying to get you to open a window with the correct name. It'll never happen. Apple should be aware of this issue, as I've filed a bug report for it using Safari's bug reporting interface, and have reported it again via Apple's official bug database (Bug # 3485193).
Until Apple fixes the bug, there are two ways to resolve this issue: First,
don't use Safari. This is the preferred solution, and since there are some
other great Browsers for Mac OS X (notably Camino, Firebird, and Mozilla),
it's a real option for most Bricolage users. The second solution is to disable
the named window by adding the undocumented configuration directive
NO_TOOLBAR to your bricolage.conf file with a false value. The downside
of this approach, however, is that all users of Bricolage will now be using
Bricolage in a window with the back button, and this can potentially lead to
problems with the state of story objects while you're editing them. However,
if you never use the back button, it should be fine.
Most likely you're using Safari on Mac OS X to access the Bricolage interface. Unfortunately, that browser seems to have some bugs related to rendering layers. The only workaround is to use a different browser. I recommend Camino, Firebird, or Mozilla.
You need Perl 5.8.0 or later for Bricolage to properly handle non-ASCII characters. Also, PostgreSQL database for Bricolage must be using UNICODE encoding. Please see Bric::Admin for further information on recommended setup for letting Bricolage correctly handle non-ASCII content.
You need to make sure that your non-Bricolage server or virtual host knows that it's server Unicode characters. If you're running an Apache server, just add this to your httpd.conf and restart:
AddDefaultCharset utf-8
Consult the documentation for your Web server for more information.
Apache inadvertantly compiled the wrong expat XML parser into itself. Rebuild
Apache, this time using the --disable-rule=EXPAT option.
Fields cannot have the same name, even if they've been deleted. This is because you might have older stories around that use the old name, and still republish them to templates that use the old name.
The solution is to give the new version of the field a different name, but make the ``Label'' the same. So you might have a name like ``new_paragraph'' and the label ``Paragraph''. Just remember to change any references to the old field name in your templates to use the new field name.
Did you add it as a subelement to a document type element, or as a subelement to any element that's part of a document type element hierarchy? If not, it won't show up in the template select list.
This section contains questions that didn't fit in the other sections.
Click on the Bricolage log in in the UI to see the ``About'' section of the online help.
[In the beginning there was chaos....]
Read the README document in the directory where you unpacked Bricolage to learn about other documents on specific things like Bricolage administration, usage, or hacking. The project's web site is http://www.bricolage.cc/. The web site lists information about mailing lists.
Not really, no. We'll likely write some one of these days. in the meantime, you might find some use in a presentation given at the 2000 OSCON by Ian Kallen, in which he discussed what Salon needed out of a CMS (including workflow) and how he came to select the tools to use the CMS that was the proof-of-concept for Bricolage. The article is at http://www.arachna.com/edu/talks/iswp/index.html.
This behavior is intentional. The search interface goes directly into an SQL query, and thus support SQL wild card characters. Unless you query for a string at the beginning of a column, the index on that column won't be used. So we default to only searching at the beginning of a field in order to take advantage of the speed provided by an index.
However, you can get around this functionality in two ways. You can by put a '%' in front of your search string, thereby forcing the SQL query to be a full substring query. Or you can enable on the ``FULL_SEARCH'' bricolage.conf directive and restart Bricolage. But know that either of these methods will a lot slower (though you probably won't notice much until you have 1000s of documents).
What is your 'Filter search results by site context' preference set to? When this preference is set to 'On', Bricolage filters search results according to the Site context selected.
No. Bricolage can use a lot of memory resources, especially if you publish a lot of documents at once, such as via the SOAP interface. Perl grabs the memory it needs, but it never releases it back to the operating system, although it will reuse it before asking the OS for more. So if you've published a lot of stories at once or done anything else to cause Bricolage to load a lot of data (such as used the search interface to get a list of all 10,000 stories in your Bricolage database), then the process that handled your request will become quite large and stay that way for its lifetime.
There are a number of ways to address this issue:
bric_soap to execute big SOAP requests, use its --chunks
option whenever possible to cut down on the amount of work any one request is
doing.
Change your Apache configuration to get a better handle on your process
sizes. Set MaxSpareServers and MinSpareServers to a reasonable numbers,
and set MaxRequestsPerChild to limit the number of requests any one child
handles. See the Apache documentation at http://httpd.apache.org/docs/ for
more information on these and related directives.
Use Bricolage's support for Apache::SizeLimit. This support is enabled via the
CHECK_PROCESS_SIZE bricolage.conf directives, and you can tune it using
the MAX_PROCESS_SIZE, CHECK_FREQUENCY, MIN_SHARE_SIZE, and
MAX_UNSHARED_SIZE directives, as well. See
Apache::Admin for details.
If you are using any character sets besides UTF-8, specify these
character sets with the LOAD_CHAR_SETS directives. This will make
sure that the character sets you are using are pre-loaded during
server startup. This is especially important for large character sets
like Big5 or Shift-JIS.
If you are using any languages besides ``en_us'', specify these
languages with the LOAD_LANGUAGES directives. This will make sure
that the languages you are using are pre-loaded during server startup.
Deleted template profiles don't actually get deleted but instead marked inactive in the database. This prevents creating a new template with the same name in them same category in the same output channel. In a future release, an easy way to reactivate deleted template profiles will be integrated in the GUI.
In the meantime, deleted (that is, deactivated) template can be brought back by using a updating the database directly and querying against the output channel ID and the template's file name:
psql -U [username] -d [databasename] -c \
"UPDATE formatting SET active = 1 WHERE output_channel__id = [ocid] \
AND file_name = '[path]'"
The arguments in brackets above are:
$story or $element in a
Mason template <%once> block. What gives?To check the syntax of a Mason template as you develop it, Bricolage creates a
Mason interpreter and compiles the template. Because <%once> blocks are
designed to execute only once, Mason actually executes them during the
compile. Of course, there is no $story or $element object when you're
editing a template, only when you're publishing or previewing a story.
But since these objects are available in a <%once> block during a
publish or preview, and as of Bricolage 1.6.14 and 1.8.0 the $burner object
is always available, you can use the $story or $element object in a <
<%once >> block like this:
<%once>;
unless ($burner->get_mode == SYNTAX_MODE) {
# Do stuff with $story or $element.
}
</%once>
DBI_USER
bricolage.conf directive.
DB_NAME
bricolage.conf directive.
Scott Lanning <slanning@theworld.com>
David Wheeler <david@kineticode.com>
README, http://bricolage.cc/, Bric::Admin