Creating a Review Board Site¶

Once Review Board is installed, a site must be created. Each site maps to a domain, subdomain, or directory installation.

To create a site, you will use the rb-site install command.

You will need to decide on a place to install the site. In the examples here, we will use /var/www/reviews.example.com. The directory should not exist yet. rb-site will create it.

Beginning Installation¶

Begin installation by running the following command:

$ rb-site install /var/www/reviews.example.com

You will now be asked a series of questions about your site setup. It is expected that you will know the answers to these questions. If not, you’ll have to decide what software you want to use for your services and refer to their documentation on how to set them up and configure them.

We recommend mod_wsgi and memcached

If you’re using Apache, we highly recommend using mod_wsgi. fastcgi has been known to have memory leak issues with Review Board, and mod_python is no longer developed or shipped with Apache.

We also strongly recommend installing and using memcached. This will greatly improve performance of your Review Board installation. If possible, put this on a server with a lot of RAM.

SQLite should only be used for test installations.

While useful and portable, SQLite does not handle large loads with many concurrent users very well. We strongly recommend using MySQL or PostgreSQL for a real deployment.

We don’t officially support converting a database from SQLite to other databases, so it’s important that you choose something that will work for you long-term.

Once you have answered all the questions and completed the installation, you’ll need to change some directory permissions and install your web server configuration files.

Changing Permissions¶

Review Board expects to be able to write to sitedir/htdocs/media/uploaded and sitedir/data and their subdirectories.

Since Review Board is run by your web server, these directories and all subdirectories and files must be writable by the user your web server runs as.

This user varies by operating system, distribution and web server, so you may need to look it up. If your web server is currently running, you can look at what user it’s running as.

Once you’ve figured this out, go ahead and change the permissions on the directories. For example, in Linux/UNIX/MacOS X with a www-data user:

$ chown -R www-data /var/www/reviews.example.com/htdocs/media/uploaded
$ chown -R www-data /var/www/reviews.example.com/data

If you’re using SQLite as your database, you will also need to change the ownership of the site’s db directory to match the web server’s user. Otherwise, you may receive an Internal Server Error when accessing the site.

Web Server Configuration¶

rb-site provides sample web server configuration files in the newly created conf/ directory under your new site directory. In many installs, these files will work out of the box, but they may require modification depending on the rest of your web server configuration.

The configuration file will be based on the web server type and Python loader you’ve specified. For example, if you used Apache and wsgi, you would use apache-wsgi.conf.

Installing these files is also dependent on the web server and operating system/distribution.

Apache¶

There are two possible Apache configuration files that will be generated, depending on whether you selected mod_wsgi, mod_python or fastcgi during rb-site install.

If you selected mod_wsgi, your configuration file will be conf/apache-wsgi.conf.

If you selected mod_python, your configuration file will be conf/apache-modpython.conf.

If you selected fastcgi, your configuration file will be conf/apache-fastcgi.conf.

Depending on your operating system or Linux distribution, the configuration file can be installed in a couple different ways.

If you have a sites-available directory in your Apache configuration directory (for example, /etc/apache2/sites-available, then you should rename your configuration file to match your site (e.g., reviews.example.com.conf) and put it in that directory. Then create a symbolic link from that file to the sites-enabled directory. This is the most common setup on Debian or Ubuntu-based distributions. So for example:

$ cd /etc/apache2/sites-available
$ cp /var/www/reviews.example.com/conf/apache-wsgi.conf reviews.example.com.conf
$ cd ../sites-enabled
$ ln -s ../sites-available/reviews.example.com.conf .

If you do not have a sites-available or sites-enabled directory, you’ll need to embed the configuration file in your global Apache configuration file (usually /etc/httpd/httpd.conf or /etc/httpd/apache2.conf).

Of course, the configuration file can be placed anywhere so long as it’s at some point included by your main Apache configuration file.

Once you’ve installed the configuration file, restart Apache and then try going to your site.

Note

Some Apache installations (such as the default installs on Debian and Ubuntu) by default define a global virtual host that shares /var/www as the document root. This may lead to problems with your install. If you access your site and see nothing but a directory listing, then you’re affected by this problem.

The solution is to remove the “default” site from your /etc/apache2/sites-enabled directory. This may be called something like default or 000-default.

lighttpd¶

The generated configuration file for lighttpd will be saved as conf/lighttpd.conf.

You should either add the contents of this file to your /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf, or include it directly from lighttpd.conf using the include directive. See the lighttpd documentation for more information.