Installing the Darwin Calendar Server 2.4 on Fedora 13 or Fedora 14

As I mentioned in my last post, I've been playing with the Darwin Calendar Server (DCS) on Linux... Today I was able to re-test my setup notes to see if they worked properly, so below I've written a tutorial on how to get your own DCS server going on Fedora 13 or 14.

Installing Dependencies

Since we will be installing CalendarServer directly from the 2.4 branch subversion repository, the first thing to do is to install subversion and the dependencies for DCS:

su -
# Required to check out the source code from the repository
yum install subversion
# Dependencies
yum install patch memcached krb5-devel python-zope-interface PyXML pyOpenSSL python-kerberos
# Requirements for compiling xattr
yum install python-setuptools gcc gcc-c++ python-devel

Enable extended file attributes (xattrs)

DCS requires user extended file attributes so the user_xattr mount option must be enabled for the partition on which CalendarServer will be storing its documents and data (in this case, /srv). If you have not already enabled this option (it is disabled by default), edit /etc/fstab and add the user_xattr mount option after defaults, for example:

/dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv_root /                       ext4    defaults,user_xattr        1 1

Grab DCS from SVN and run auto-setup

Once these packages have been installed and extended file attributes have been enabled, we will begin setting up the CalendarServer as your regular, non-root user.

# Directory to hold CalendarServer checkout and its dependencies
mkdir CalendarServer
cd CalendarServer
# Checkout the code from the repo
svn checkout http://svn.calendarserver.org/repository/calendarserver/CalendarServer/tags/release/CalendarServer-2.4 CalendarServer-2.4
cd CalendarServer-2.4
# Start auto-setup
./run -s

Auto-setup will now attempt to grab any missing dependencies for CalendarServer an will unpack and patch them accordingly. You may find that the download for PyDirector stalls - if so, hit to abort setup and download it manually:

pushd ..
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/pythondirector/pydirector-1.0.0.tar.gz
tar xfz pydirector-1.0.0.tar.gz
popd
# Resume unpacking
./run -s

Prepare for installation

Since DCS bundles a modified version of Twisted as well as a few other projects (such as pydirector), we will now prepare an installation root folder to avoid conflicts with system libraries (i.e., Twisted if it has been installed from the Fedora repos). This code will be run as root.

su -
# setup data & document roots
mkdir -p /srv/CalendarServer/{Data,Documents}
chown -R daemon:daemon /srv/CalendarServer/
# setup installation root
mkdir -p /opt/CalendarServer/etc/caldavd
mkdir -p /opt/CalendarServer/var/run/caldavd
mkdir -p /opt/CalendarServer/var/log/caldavd

Install DCS and configure the server instance

The last step is to install DCS from the Subversion checkout we made earlier into the installation root. Replace /home/regularuser with the actual path to the home directory of your regular user.

# install DCS to installation root
cd /home/regularuser/CalendarServer/CalendarServer-2.4
./run -i /opt/CalendarServer
rm -rf /opt/CalendarServer/usr/caldavd/caldavd.plist
# copy sample configuration files
cp conf/servertoserver-test.xml /opt/CalendarServer/etc/caldavd/servertoserver.xml
cp conf/auth/accounts.xml /opt/CalendarServer/etc/caldavd/accounts.xml
cp conf/caldavd-test.plist /opt/CalendarServer/etc/caldavd/caldavd.plist
cp conf/sudoers.plist /opt/CalendarServer/etc/caldavd/sudoers.plist
# change permissions; passwords are stored plaintext!
chmod 600 /opt/CalendarServer/etc/caldavd/*

I have reported bugs #390 and #391 about problems with the setup script on 64-bit machines as well as a problem if a custom destination installation directory is used (which we did). This bit of code works around both of the bugs:

# 64-bit fix - see https://trac.calendarserver.org/ticket/391
sitelib="$(python -c 'from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib; print(get_python_lib())')"
sitearch="$(python -c 'from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib; print(get_python_lib(1))')"
if [ "$sitelib" != "$sitearch" ];then
  mv /opt/CalendarServer"${sitelib}"/twisted/plugins/caldav.py* /opt/CalendarServer"${sitearch}"/twisted/plugins
  # PYTHONPATH fix for 64-bit - see https://trac.calendarserver.org/ticket/390
  sed -i.orig 's|PYTHONPATH="'"${sitelib}"'|DESTDIR=/opt/CalendarServer\nPYTHONPATH="${DESTDIR}'"${sitelib}"':${DESTDIR}'"${sitearch}"':|' /opt/CalendarServer/usr/bin/caldavd
else
  # PYTHONPATH fix for 32-bit - see https://trac.calendarserver.org/ticket/390
  sed -i.orig 's|PYTHONPATH="'"${sitelib}"'|DESTDIR=/opt/CalendarServer\nPYTHONPATH="${DESTDIR}'"${sitelib}"':|' /opt/CalendarServer/usr/bin/caldavd
fi

If you would like your server to use SSL (highly recommended), you will need to generate a certificate. If you have a certificate and key ready to install, place it in /opt/CalendarServer/etc/tls. If not, you can easily generate a free self-signed one:

# Generate SSL keys
mkdir /opt/CalendarServer/etc/tls
openssl req -new -newkey rsa:1024 -days 365 -nodes -x509 -keyout www.example.com.key -out www.example.com.crt

Now, edit /opt/CalendarServer/etc/caldavd/caldavd.plist in your favorite editor and configure the server as follows:

   
   ServerHostName
   example.com
# Data roots
   
   DataRoot
   /srv/CalendarServer/Data/
        
   
   DocumentRoot
   /srv/CalendarServer/Documents/
# Test accounts configuration
   
   DirectoryService
   
     type
     twistedcaldav.directory.xmlfile.XMLDirectoryService
         
     params
     
       xmlFile
       /opt/CalendarServer/etc/caldavd/accounts.xml
     
   
# Sudoers configuration
   
   SudoersFile
   /opt/CalendarServer/etc/caldavd/sudoers.plist
# Delete this section

     Wiki
     
       Enabled
       
       Cookie
       sessionID
       URL
       http://127.0.0.1/RPC2
       UserMethod
       userForSession
       WikiMethod
       accessLevelForUserWikiCalendar
     
# logging
   
   
   AccessLogFile
   /opt/CalendarServer/var/log/caldavd/access.log
   RotateAccessLog
   
   
   ErrorLogFile
   /opt/CalendarServer/var/log/caldavd/error.log
   
   DefaultLogLevel
   info
# a bit further down…
   
   GlobalStatsSocket
   /opt/CalendarServer/var/run/caldavd/caldavd-stats.sock
#
   
   ServerStatsFile
   /opt/CalendarServer/var/log/caldavd/stats.plist
       
   
   PIDFile
   /opt/CalendarServer/var/run/caldavd/caldavd.pid
# SSL 
   
   SSLCertificate
   /opt/CalendarServer/etc/tls/www.example.com.crt
           
   
   SSLPrivateKey 
   /opt/CalendarServer/etc/tls/www.example.com.key
# Privilege drop
   
   
   UserName
   daemon
   
   GroupName
   daemon
       
   ProcessType
   Combined
# iSchedule server-to-server settings
     
     iSchedule
     
       Enabled
       
       AddressPatterns
       
       
       Servers
       /opt/CalendarServer/etc/caldavd/servertoserver.xml
     
# Communication socket
   
   ControlSocket
   /opt/CalendarServer/var/run/caldavd/caldavd.sock
# Twisted
   
        
   Twisted
   
     twistd
     /opt/CalendarServer/usr/bin/twistd
   
# Load balancer
   
   PythonDirector
   
     pydir
     /opt/CalendarServer/usr/bin/pydir.py
     ConfigFile
     /opt/CalendarServer/etc/pydir.xml

ControlSocket /opt/CalendarServer/var/run/caldavd/caldavd-pydir.sock

...Profit!

Try starting the server!

/opt/CalendarServer/usr/bin/caldavd -T /opt/CalendarServer/usr/bin/twistd -f /opt/CalendarServer/etc/caldavd/caldavd.plist -X

If all goes well, press to kill the process and then daemonize it:

/opt/CalendarServer/usr/bin/caldavd -T /opt/CalendarServer/usr/bin/twistd -f /opt/CalendarServer/etc/caldavd/caldavd.plist