OpenERP on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Here are some quick instructions to get OpenERP 6 up and running on RHEL6 (or any of its clones such as CentOS, Ascendos, etc.). It’s not meant to be a full howto, but might help in some cases.

OpenERP is still not included in Fedora nor EPEL as of writing this. Hopefully this will change soon, and the progress can easily be seen in bug #693425. Until then, I’ve built my own packages of OpenERP.

1. Download and install openerp-server available here (version 6.0.3 initially). All its requirements are available from EPEL :

   # Replace the version with the latest one
   yum install http://dl.marmotte.net/rpms/redhat/el6/x86_64/openerp-server-6.0.3-0.el6/openerp-server-6.0.3-0.el6.noarch.rpm
   

2. Install PostgreSQL and create the openerp user. The easiest is to have it on the same server, but that’s not mandatory :

   [root@host ~]$ yum install postgresql-server
   [...]
   [root@host ~]$ vi /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf
   # IMPORTANT: Replace "ident" with "md5" on the "host  all  all  127.0.0.1/32" line
   [root@host ~]$ service postgresql initdb
   Initializing database:                                     [  OK  ]
   [root@host ~]$ service postgresql start
   Starting postgresql service:                               [  OK  ]
   [root@burst10 ~]$ su - postgres
   [postgres@host ~]$ createuser --pwprompt --no-createdb --no-createrole --no-superuser openerp
   Enter password for new role: 
   Enter it again: 
   [postgres@host ~]$ createdb -O openerp openerp
   [postgres@host ~]$
   

3. Edit the /etc/openerp-server.conf configuration file to make the following changes. Note that this way we split the “openerp” user’s access to PostgreSQL by making sure it goes through TCP and not the UNIX socket, as we enabled md5 password authentication for TCP while the UNIX socket still used ident, which the system “postgres” account needs :

   db_host = 127.0.0.1
   db_port = 5432
   db_name = openerp
   db_user = openerp
   db_password = WhateverYouPreviouslySet
   

4. Start the OpenERP Server and enabled it at startup :

   [root@host ~]$ service openerp-server start
   Preparing OpenERP Server Daemon: 
   Starting OpenERP Server Daemon (openerp-server):           [  OK  ]
   [root@host ~]$ chkconfig --level 345 openerp-server on
   [root@host ~]$ 
   

If you get the error Error: FATAL: Ident authentication failed for user "openerp" then you haven’t replaced “ident” with “md5” in /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf as instructed above.

You should now be ready to move on to setting up the OpenERP Client (GTK) or Web Client.