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Manual Installation

This page was updated in July 2021 for the release of IXP Manager v6.0 and installation on Ubuntu LTS 20.04.

Video Tutorial

We created a video tutorial demonstrating the manual installation process for IXP Manager v6.0.0 (July 2021) on Ubuntu LTS 20.04. You can find the latest installation videos. As always, the full catalog of video tutorials is here.

Requirements

IXP Manager tries to stay current in terms of technology. Typically, this means some element of framework refresh(es) every couple of years and other more incremental package upgrades with minor version upgrades. As well as the obvious reasons for this, there is also the requirement to prevent developer apathy - insisting on legacy frameworks and packages that have been EOL'd provides a major stumbling block for bringing on new developers and contributors.

The current requirements for the web application are:

  • a Linux / BSD host - all documentation and videos relate to Ubuntu LTS.
  • MySQL 8.
  • Apache / Nginx / etc.
  • PHP >= 8.0. Note that IXP Manager >= v6.0 will not run on older versions of PHP.
  • Memcached - optional but recommended.

To complete the installation using the included config/scripts, you will also need to have installed git (apt install git) and a number of PHP extensions (see the example apt install below).

Regrettably the potential combinations of operating systems, versions of same and then versions of PHP are too numerous to provide individual support. As such, we recommend installing IXP Manager on Ubuntu LTS 20.04 and we officially support this platform.

In fact, we provide a complete installation script for this - see the automated installation page for details. If you have any issues with the manual installation, the automated script should be your first reference to compare what you are doing to what we recommend.

For completeness, the IXP Manager installation script for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS installs:

apt install -qy apache2 php8.0 php8.0-intl php8.0-rrd php8.0-cgi php8.0-cli              \
    php8.0-snmp php8.0-curl  php8.0-memcached libapache2-mod-php8.0 mysql-server         \
    mysql-client php8.0-mysql memcached snmp php8.0-mbstring php8.0-xml php8.0-gd        \
    php8.0-bcmath bgpq3 php8.0-memcache unzip php8.0-zip git php8.0-yaml                 \
    php8.0-ds libconfig-general-perl libnetaddr-ip-perl mrtg  libconfig-general-perl     \
    libnetaddr-ip-perl rrdtool librrds-perl curl composer

Do note that Ubuntu 20.04 LTS comes with PHP 7.4 so you must enable Ondřej Surý's excellent Ubuntu PHP PPA (and maybe buy him a pint). This can be enabled with:

apt-get install -yq software-properties-common
add-apt-repository -y ppa:ondrej/php

If you are using a different platform, you will need to replicate the above as appropriate for your chosen platform.

Get the IXP Manager Source

The code for IXP Manager is maintained on GitHub and the canonical repository is inex/IXP-Manager.

Log into the server where you wish to install IXP Manager. Move to the directory where you wish to store the source (the automated script, our documentation and our examples use /srv/ixpmanager which we refer to as $IXPROOT). Note that it should not be cloned into any web exposed directory (e.g. do not clone to /var/www).

IXPROOT=/srv/ixpmanager
cd /srv
git clone https://github.com/inex/IXP-Manager.git ixpmanager
cd $IXPROOT   # /srv/ixpmanager
git checkout release-v6
chown -R www-data: bootstrap/cache storage

Initial Setup and Dependencies

Dependencies

Install the required PHP libraries:

First you will need Composer v2 but v1 ships with Ubuntu 20.04. Composer is PHP's package manager and you can download and install it per the copy and paste instructions here (always satisfy yourself with the trustworthiness of the source when downloading and executing scripts).

We assume you downloaded it to $IXPROOT as composer.phar in the following:

cd $IXPROOT
php composer.phar install --no-dev --prefer-dist
cp .env.example .env
php artisan key:generate

Database Setup

Use whatever means you like to create a database and user for IXP Manager. For example:

CREATE DATABASE `ixpmanager` CHARACTER SET = 'utf8mb4' COLLATE = 'utf8mb4_unicode_ci';
CREATE USER `ixpmanager`@`localhost` IDENTIFIED BY '<pick a password!>';
GRANT SUPER ON *.* TO `ixpmanager`@`localhost`;
GRANT ALL ON `ixpmanager`.* TO `ixpmanager`@`localhost`;
GRANT SUPER ON *.* TO `ixpmanager`@`localhost`;
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Then edit $IXPROOT/.env and set the database options:

DB_HOST=localhost
DB_DATABASE=ixpmanager
DB_USERNAME=ixpmanager
DB_PASSWORD=<the password you picked above!>

Now create the database schema:

php artisan migrate
# Run it twice for completeness
php artisan migrate

Some older scripts still rely on MySQL view tables. Create these with:

# We use root here as the views.sql also contain triggers
mysql -u root ixpmanager < $IXPROOT/tools/sql/views.sql

Configuration

Edit $IXPROOT/.env and review and set/change all parameters. Hopefully this is mostly documented or clear but please start a discussion on the mailing list if you have difficultly and we'll update this and the example file's documentation as appropriate.

Initial Database Objects

Using the settings you edited in .env we'll create some database objects. [Yes, a setup wizard needs to be built!].

First let's create the password for the admin user. The following will create a secure random password and hash it with bcrypt:

cd $IXPROOT
source .env
USERNAME=admin
USEREMAIL=your@email.address
IXPM_ADMIN_PW="$( openssl rand -base64 12 )"
ADMIN_PW_SALT="$( openssl rand -base64 16 )"
HASH_PW=$( php -r "echo escapeshellarg( crypt( '${IXPM_ADMIN_PW}', sprintf( '\$2a\$%02d\$%s', 10, substr( '${ADMIN_PW_SALT}', 0, 22 ) ) ) );" )
echo Your password is: $IXPM_ADMIN_PW

NAME="Joe"
IXPNAME=SCIX
IXPSNAME=SCIX
IXPASN=65500
IXPPEEREMAIL=peering@example.com
IXPNOCPHONE=12345678
IXPNOCEMAIL=noc@example.com
IXPWWW="http://www.example.com"

The following is taken from the IXP Manager installation script:

mysql -h $DB_HOST -u $DB_USERNAME "-p${DB_PASSWORD}" $DB_DATABASE <<END_SQL
INSERT INTO infrastructure ( name, shortname, isPrimary, created_at, updated_at )
    VALUES ( 'Infrastructure #1', '#1', 1, NOW(), NOW() );
SET @infraid = LAST_INSERT_ID();

INSERT INTO company_registration_detail ( registeredName, created_at, updated_at ) VALUES ( '${IXPNAME}', NOW(), NOW() );
SET @crdid = LAST_INSERT_ID();

INSERT INTO company_billing_detail ( billingContactName, invoiceMethod, billingFrequency, created_at, updated_at )
    VALUES ( '${NAME}', 'EMAIL', 'NOBILLING', NOW(), NOW() );
SET @cbdid = LAST_INSERT_ID();

INSERT INTO cust ( name, shortname, type, abbreviatedName, autsys, maxprefixes, peeringemail, nocphone, noc24hphone,
        nocemail, nochours, nocwww, peeringpolicy, corpwww, datejoin, status, activepeeringmatrix, isReseller,
        company_registered_detail_id, company_billing_details_id, created_at, updated_at )
    VALUES ( '${IXPNAME}', '${IXPSNAME}', 3, '${IXPSNAME}', ${IXPASN}, 100, '${IXPPEEREMAIL}', '${IXPNOCPHONE}',
        '${IXPNOCPHONE}', '${IXPNOCEMAIL}', '24x7', '', 'mandatory', '${IXPWWW}', NOW(), 1, 1, 0, @crdid, @cbdid, NOW(), NOW() );
SET @custid = LAST_INSERT_ID();

INSERT INTO user ( custid, name, username, password, email, privs, disabled, created_at, updated_at )
    VALUES ( @custid, '${NAME}', '${USERNAME}', ${HASH_PW}, '${USEREMAIL}', 3, 0, NOW(), NOW() );
SET @userid = LAST_INSERT_ID();

INSERT INTO customer_to_users ( customer_id, user_id, privs, created_at, updated_at )
    VALUES ( @custid, @userid, 3, NOW(), NOW() );

INSERT INTO contact ( custid, name, email, created_at, updated_at )
    VALUES ( @custid, '${NAME}', '${USEREMAIL}', NOW(), NOW() );
END_SQL

And finally seed the database:

cd $IXPROOT
php artisan db:seed --force --class=IRRDBs
php artisan db:seed --force --class=Vendors
php artisan db:seed --force --class=ContactGroups

File Permissions

The web server needs write access to some directories:

cd $IXPROOT
chown -R www-data: storage/ bootstrap/cache/
chmod -R u+rwX     storage/ bootstrap/cache/

Setting Up Apache

Here is a sample virtual hosts file for IXP Manager (replace {$IXPROOT} as appropriate!):

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
    DocumentRoot ${IXPROOT}/public
    <Directory ${IXPROOT}/public>
        Options FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride None
        Require all granted
        RewriteEngine On
        RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -s [OR]
        RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -l [OR]
        RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
        RewriteRule ^.*$ - [NC,L]
        RewriteRule ^.*$ /index.php [NC,L]
    </Directory>
    ErrorLog \${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
    CustomLog \${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

You also need to enable rewrite:

a2enmod rewrite
service apache2 restart

Congratulations!

Your new IXP Manager installation should be accessible via your server's IP address using the username ($USERNAME) and password ($IXPM_ADMIN_PW) you set above.

If you plan to use this in production, you should:

  • secure your server with an iptables firewall
  • install an SSL certificate and redirect HTTP access to HTTPS
  • complete the installation of the many features of IXP Manager such as route server generation, member stats, peer to peer graphs, etc.
  • PLEASE TELL US! We'd like to add you to the users list at https://www.ixpmanager.org/community/world-map - just complete the form there or drop us an email to operations <at> inex <dot> ie.

What next? See our post-install / next steps document here.