Installing Pier on Ubuntu

The instructions on the Pier site are a bit terse, so I'm recording my actions to get Pier up and running.

Where to copy the files

• download Pier-2.0-OneClick.zip from http://www.piercms.com/download
• mount or unzip archive image. Note that file contents, Pier.app, has owner:group of you:you [where you is your username] by default
• open shell and

sudo su cd /srv mkdir site chown you:www-data site

• I used www-data as the group because it already existed and appears to be intended for www sites, also I was already a member by default after installing Ubuntu. It is probably not a good idea to let any webserver be root

Copy to the /srv/site folder the following files [from Pier.app/Contents/Resources]:

pier.image,

pier.changes,

files/ folder,

• I didn't find the next file in /Resources:

SqueakV39.sources

but I did find PharoV10.sources there, so I assume the instructions are out of date and copied that instead.

• The permissions on Pier.app were unpacked with default permissions and probably should be changed to the www server group, www-data. This will (hopefully) make the contents of site and all subcontents have sane permissions and ownership:

chown you:www-data -R site

First run

The instructions say:

you can run the image headless by using the following bash script:

• I'm not exactly sure what is meant by 'headless(-ly) but I think it has something to do with Apache, in the next section. I wasn't expecting to get into installing apache. I thought the image would be a complete webserver!

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