ApTest Manager has some basic environment requirements. This document describes those requirements and suggests ways to satisfy them.

Table of Contents

1 Server system

ApTest Manager must be installed on a system that can act as a server. You will need administrative access in a shell window to the system on which ApTest Manager is to be installed in order to perform this installation.

ApTest Manager can be installed on virtually any hardware platform that supports Mac OS X 10.4 or higher, but for production use a comparatively modern server system is required. A recommended minimum configuration is a 1.4GHz G4 with 1GB of RAM and 20-40GB of free disk space (depending on the size of your test case collection, number of tests run, etc.). The server may be shared with other applications, and does not need to be dedicated to ApTest Manager.

The following facilities must be available on the server:

  • A web server
  • Perl
  • Some system libraries and tools
  • Access to the internet to retrieve any required Perl modules that are not already installed.

Note: Most ApTest Manager operations require sufficient free disk space to complete those operations. Should the partition on which you store your ApTest Manager data fill up, YOU WILL LOSE DATA! Therefore, you should always monitor your server to ensure that sufficient disk space is available. If you ever run out of disk space on the ApTest Manager partition, you will need to restore your data from a backup before ApTest Manager will become operational again.

1.1 Web server

The web server must support CGI or mod_perl.

The most commonly used server is Apache, which supports both CGI and mod_perl.

On Mac OS X, you should enable mod_perl by uncommenting (removing the leading '#' characters) two lines in /etc/httpd/httpd.conf:

#LoadModule perl_module                 libexec/httpd/libperl.so
#AddModule  mod_perl.c
        

You should also enable mod_expires, since this will dramatically improve performance when accessing ApTest Manager from Internet Explorer on Windows clients.

Note: ApTest Manager runs much faster using mod_perl, and so Apache with mod_perl is the preferred web server configuration.

If using Apache 1.3, use mod_perl 1. If using Apache 2, use mod_perl 1.99.08 or later, or 2.01 or later.

1.2 Perl

Note: it is possible that during installation, ApTest Manager will attempt to install additional Perl modules. Some of these modules may require a C compiler to build. This C compiler must be the same compiler as the one that was used to build Perl itself. You can see what compiler that was by executing the command "perl -V".

ApTest Manager uses Perl modules that require some additional system libraries. On Mac OS X, these include the Apple Computer XCode and X11 extensions, the tool Fink, and the libraries gd2 and expat installed using Fink (or Fink Commander).

Once the XCode and X11 extensions are installed (from your Mac OS X distribution CD/DVD), install Fink and Fink Commander. Then install openssl-dev, gd2 and expat from the Fink Commander interactive package manager screen. This will automatically include all the related packages.

2 Client systems

To access ApTest Manager, you will need a web browser that supports Javascript 1.2 and frames. Modern versions of Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Firefox are known to work well with ApTest Manager; some parts of the product do not work correctly with Opera nor with Safari, but downgrade gracefully.

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