Technical architecture

#Server side set up for hosting

#Hardware

The required configuration depends on your volume and your usage. As we are based on Elasticsearch and MySQL, please check their dedicated documentation to define your server size.

Should you use VCPu, keep in mind that VCPus do not provide same level of performance as real CPUs. Amazon servers, for instance, offer only 10 to 25% of performances of a real CPU.

#Software

#System Requirements

Here is the list of system requirements that should be fulfilled to be able to install Akeneo PIM.

Operating Systems

Akeneo PIM only works on Linux servers. The application’s behaviour has been tested on several operating systems. We cannot guarantee the behaviour of the application on servers different from:

Debian (Linux)

≥ 10 (64 bits)

Ubuntu (Linux)

≥ 18.04 (64 bits)

CentOS / RHEL* (Linux)

≥ 7

  • RHEL stands for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Web server and configuration

We can only guarantee the behaviour on the following web server:

Apache web server

≥ 2.4

The web server will also need the following libraries and modules:

mod rewrite

Required

mod-fastcgi

Required (no CGI nor libmod-php)

PHP required modules and configuration

PHP

8.0

php8.0-apcu

apc.enable_cli=1

php8.0-bcmath

No specific configuration

php8.0-curl

No specific configuration

php8.0-fpm

No specific configuration

php8.0-intl

No specific configuration

php8.0-mysql

No specific configuration

php8.0-xml

No specific configuration

php8.0-zip

No specific configuration

php8.0-exif

No specific configuration

php8.0-imagick

No specific configuration

php8.0-cli

No specific configuration

php8.0-opcache

No specific configuration

php8.0-gd

No specific configuration

php8.0-mbstring

No specific configuration

php8.0-memcached

No specific configuration

composer

>= 2

function exec() is required in order to handle data import/export, check if it hasn’t been disabled in your php.ini.

Besides these modules, the following configuration is the minimal configuration required:

  • Setup CLI php.ini file /etc/php/8.0/cli/php.ini

$ sudo vim /etc/php/8.0/cli/php.ini
memory_limit = 1024M
date.timezone = UTC

Use the time zone matching your location, for example America/Los_Angeles or Europe/Berlin. See https://www.php.net/timezones for the list of all available timezones.

  • Setup FPM php.ini file /etc/php/8.0/fpm/php.ini

If you have several PHP versions on your server, these files can be located in /etc/php/x.x/fpm/php.ini and /etc/php/x.x/cli/php.ini.

$ sudo vim /etc/php/8.0/fpm/php.ini
memory_limit = 512M
date.timezone = UTC

To avoid spending too much time on permission problems between the CLI user and the FPM user, a good practice is to use the same user for both of them.

This configuration is aimed to easily set up a development machine. It is absolutely not suited for a production environment.

  • Get your identifiers

$ id
uid=1000(my_user), gid=1000(my_group), ...

In this example, the user is my_user and the group is my_group.

  • Stop FPM

$ sudo service php8.0-fpm stop
  • Open the file /etc/php/8.0/fpm/pool.d/www.conf with your favorite text editor:

$ sudo vi /etc/php/8.0/fpm/pool.d/www.conf
# replace these environment variables:
user = my_user
group = my_group
listen = /run/php/php8.0-fpm.sock
listen.owner = www-data
listen.group = www-data

On the default installation, FPM user and group are www-data. listen.owner and listen.group must be set on the same user than your Apache server. /run/php/php8.0-fpm.sock is the default socket path. If you changed it in /etc/php/8.0/fpm/pool.d/www.conf, change it in the Apache virtual host too.

  • Restart FPM

$ sudo service php8.0-fpm restart

Extra dependencies

Image magick

≥ 6.8

aspell

≥ 0.60.7

aspell-en

aspell-fr

aspell-de

aspell-es

aspell-it

aspell-sv

aspell-da

aspell-nl

aspell-pt-br

aspell-no

Optional dependencies

MagickCore extra codecs

≥ libmagickcore-6.q16-2-extra

Image magick extra codecs to handle SVG

Javascript (required only for development purposes)

nodejs

≥ 14

yarn

≥ 1.22

JQuery

3.4

Database server

MySQL (SQL)

8.0.23

To use this database you will also require the distribution package:

mysql-server

Required

and the following PHP modules:

php8.0-mysql

Required

Please note that if you’re using a managed MySQL service (GCP, AWS, or Azure for example), make sure they provide the required MySQL version.

Search engine

Elasticsearch

7.16

Elasticsearch is bundled with its own JDK version, but if you want to use the no JDK version <https://www.elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch-no-jdk>_, please make sure to install the right JDK for Elasticsearch.

Files and folders access rights

Most of the application folders and files require only read access. Here is a list of folders that also need write access for the FPM user:

var/cache

Contains application cache files

var/logs

Contains application log files

var/uploads

Contains files uploaded to the application by users or during import processes

public

Contains the web assets required by the application

These permissions are the ones required by the Symfony Framework (see its official documentation for more information).

Akeneo PIM application uses an abstraction layer called Flysystem to store media and files uploaded from the application. By default, Flysystem is configured to store these files on the application server, but this configuration can be easily changed in favor of, for example, a distributed remote storage system (see Flysystem documentation for more information).

Please note that neither Apache or the CLI should be run under the root user.

URL root path

We do not support Akeneo PIM in a non-root configuration. For example http://example.com/pim/ is not supported whereas http://example.com/ or http://pim.example.com/ are supported. We strongly recommend to access the PIM through a root URL. Some parts of the application may misbehave when accessed through a subpath.


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