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Installation (Linux)

This guide shows how to install Apleno Server on a Linux operating system.

Distributions

Apleno Server has been tested on several Debian (stretch and later version) and Ubuntu (18.04 and later) versions.

Automatic installation

Depending on your Linux distribution and version, we may provide you an all-in-one, one-command script to execute that will install all dependencies and Apleno Server. You will have nothing to do after the execution of the script.

Installing R and/or Python

Depending on the apps you will use on Apleno Server, you might want to install R/Python on your server. We recommend to use rig for installing R and uv for installing Python.

Installing Apleno Server

The recommended location to install Apleno Server is in /opt.

# mkdir /opt/apleno
# cd /opt/apleno
# wget LINK_TO_APLENO_SERVER_GIVEN_TO_YOU
# unzip apleno-server.zip
# rm apleno-server.zip

Before starting Apleno Server for the first time, set at least the server port and the public URL. The recommended way on Linux is a .env file next to the apleno-server executable:

# nano .env

PORT=8080
ROOT=https://apleno.example.com

See the configuration file page for the full list of settings and their environment variable names.

Note

A legacy config.yml file (edited with a command like nano config.yml) is also still supported for existing installs upgrading from an older version. Apleno Server migrates it automatically on first start. New installs should use a .env file instead.

Once configured, start Apleno Server:

# ./apleno-server

When Apleno Server is correctly running, you should land on the first-time wizard.

Creating a user for the service

It is recommended to create a user that will be used only for running Apleno Server. Do not forget to give it read and write rights to the Apleno server folder.

# useradd -r apleno
# chown -R apleno:apleno /opt/apleno

Running the server

If your distribution has systemd installed, you can create a script in /etc/systemd/system/apleno.service with this content:

[Unit]
Description=Apleno
After=network.target

[Service]
WorkingDirectory=/opt/apleno
User=apleno
Group=apleno
Restart=no
ExecStart=/opt/apleno/apleno-server server
StandardOutput=journal
StandardError=journal

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Make sure to adapt the WorkingDirectory folder with the folder containing your Apleno Server installation, and User and Group with the user the service will run as.

You can then start the service with:

# systemctl enable apleno

This will make Apleno Server to automatically start when the server start. You can then run # systemctl stop apleno to stop it and # systemctl start apleno to start it again.

With screen (deprecated)

Apleno can be run in screen:

# screen -dmS apleno ./apleno-server server

You can detach from screen with Ctrl+A then D, and Apleno Server will keep running in background. The server is then executed in a Linux screen environment. You can stop Apleno Server console with screen -r apleno and then Ctrl+C.

Installing packages

On Linux, CRAN does not provide already-compiled packages when using install.packages(). Thus, all packages need to be compiled, which can be a long task. Some R packages depend on tens of other packages that also need to be compiled. Because of this, we recommend that you manually install the most common R packages you will use from an SSH session in R.

Warning

Some R packages also need system dependencies, and their compilation can fail without them.