Easy Install instructions

This is the home of Easy Install for the Citadel system. If you don't know what Citadel is, you're starting in the wrong place. Please go to the main Citadel web site.

Easy Install is a one-step installer which downloads, compiles, and configures a complete Citadel system on your computer. It basically does the same things you would do if you were building Citadel by hand, but with Easy Install, all of these steps are automated and performed in the correct order without your intervention.

Who should use this

Anyone who wants to install the Citadel system but does not want to manually build it from source code. You can also upgrade Citadel using Easy Install, as long as Easy Install was used for the initial installation.

Prerequisites

Easy Install is designed for Linux. It has been tested on several different distributions. Other unix-like platforms (BSD, Solaris, etc.) may work, but this has not been tested. If you have trouble with Easy Install on a non-Linux platform, please visit one of the Citadel support forums for help building from the source tarballs. You can find the Citadel support forums at Uncensored! BBS. After creating an account, please leave your support questions in the "Citadel Support" room (not in the Lobby, please).

To get started...

Log on to your Linux system as root and enter the following command at the prompt:

curl https://easyinstall.citadel.org/install | bash

Or if you don't have curl, try wget:

wget -q -O - https://easyinstall.citadel.org/install | bash

Easy Install will automatically initialize. Please note that we said "easy," not "fast." It will compile a lot of code and is therefore quite time consuming. If you want a faster install, the container ("docker") version of Citadel is for you.

So, what's it going to do? When you begin Easy Install, the following things are going to happen:

• If your Linux distribution is identified, Easy Install will offer to try installing some of the dependencies.
• Citadel Server, the WebCit front end, the text mode client, and some of the supporting libraries such as Berkeley DB will be downloaded from the Easy Install web site.
• All packages will be compiled and installed. This will take a long time. Citadel will be installed to /usr/local/citadel, WebCit will be installed to /usr/local/webcit, and the supporting libraries will be installed to /usr/local/ctdlsupport.
• The setup program will initialize, and you will be asked a few questions about how you want the software configured. You will be offered the opportunity to disable any email and groupware software already installed on your system, and you will be offered the opportunity to have the Citadel services automatically initialized on startup.
• WebCit will be similarly configured. If you are not running some other web server (such as Nginx or Apache), you can run WebCit on port 80; otherwise, pick some other port.

After Installation

After installing Citadel, log in and create an account using the name you gave Easy Install. Although most of the settings for the server come with sensible defaults, you will probably want to use the web based administration functions to customize your system somewhat. Information on these settings and what they do can be found in the online documentation.

Have Fun!