This is a generic guide to installing NAV from source code on a *NIX flavored operating system. The specifics of how to install NAV's dependencies, such as PostgreSQL
or Graphite
will be entirely up to you and your choice of OS.
This section specifies what software packages are needed to build and run NAV. Be aware that many of these packages have dependencies of their own.
To build NAV, you need at least the following:
- Python >= 3.7.0
- Sphinx >= 1.0 (for building this documentation)
To run NAV, these software packages are required:
- Apache2 + mod_wsgi (or, really, any web server that supports the WSGI interface)
- PostgreSQL >= 9.6 (With the
hstore
extension available)Graphite
- Python >= 3.7.0
- nbtscan = 1.5.1
- dhcping (only needed if using DHCP service monitor)
PostgreSQL and Graphite are services that do not necessarily need to run on the same server as NAV.
The required Python modules can be installed either from your OS package manager, or from the Python Package Index (PyPI) using the regular setup.py
method described below. The packages can also be installed from PyPI in a separate step, using the pip tool and the provided requirements and constraints files:
pip install -r requirements.txt -c constraints.txt
However, some of the required modules are C extensions that will require the presence of some C libraries to be correctly built (unless PyPI provides binary wheels for your platform). These include the psycopg2
driver and the python-ldap
and Pillow
modules).
The current Python requirements are as follows:
../../requirements/django32.txt
../../requirements/base.txt
If you want to connect a mobile phone to your NAV server and enable SMS alerts in alert profiles, you will need to install Gammu
and the Python gammu
module. The SMS daemon can use plugins to dispatch text messages through other means, but using Gammu as an SMS dispatcher is the default.
To build and install NAV and all its Python dependencies:
pip install -r requirements.txt -c constraints.txt .
This will build and install NAV in the default system-wide directories for your system. If you wish to customize the install locations, please consult the output of python setup.py install --help
.
NAV will look for its configuration files in various locations on your file system. These locations can be listed by running:
nav config path
To install a set of pristine NAV configuration files into one of these locations, e.g. in /etc/nav
, run:
nav config install /etc/nav
To verify that NAV can find its main configuration file, run:
nav config where
Before NAV can run, the database schema must be installed in your PostgreSQL server. NAV can create a database user and a database schema for you.
Choose a password for your NAV database user and set this in the userpw_nav
in the db.conf
config file. As the postgres
superuser, run the following command:
navsyncdb -c
This will attempt to create a new database user, a new database and initialize it with NAV's schema.
NAV's web interface is implemented using the Django framework, and can be served in any web server environment supported by Django (chiefly, any environment that supports WSGI). This guide is primarily concerned with Apache 2.
An example configuration file for Apache2 is provided the configuration directory, apache/apache.conf.example
. This configuration uses mod_wsgi
to serve the NAV web application, and can be modified to suit your installation paths. Once complete, it can be included in your virtualhost config, which needn't contain much more than this:
ServerName nav.example.org
ServerAdmin webmaster@example.org
Include /path/to/your/nav/apache.conf
Important
You should always protect your NAV web site using SSL!
You want your web server to be able to serve all of NAV's static resources. You can install all of them by issuing the following command:
# django-admin collectstatic --settings=nav.django.settings
You have requested to collect static files at the destination
location as specified in your settings:
/usr/share/nav/www/static
This will overwrite existing files!
Are you sure you want to do this?
Type 'yes' to continue, or 'no' to cancel:
In this example, type yes
, hit Enter
, and ensure your web server's document root points to /usr/share/nav/www
, because that is where the static
directory is located. If that doesn't suit you, you will at least need an Alias to point the /static
URL to the static
directory.
Apart from the pping
and snmptrapd
daemons, no NAV processes should ever be run as root
. You should create a non-privileged system user and group, and ensure the NAV_USER
option in nav.conf
is set accordingly. Also make sure this user has permissions to write to the directories configured in PID_DIR
, LOG_DIR
and UPLOAD_DIR
.
Note
The pping
and snmptrapd
daemons must be started as root
to be able to create privileged communication sockets. Both daemons will drop privileges and run as the configured non-privileged user as soon as the sockets have been acquired.
If you wish, this HTML documentation can be built separately using this step:
python setup.py build_sphinx
The resulting files will typically be placed in build/sphinx/html/
.
If you want to serve this documentation on your NAV web server, you should copy the html
directory to a suitable location and make sure that location is served as /doc
on the web server. If using the example Apache configuration (apache.conf.example
), there is a define named documentation_path
, which can be set to point to this file system location.