Installing distribution-specific packages [VC 21.3.1 GEN]

Use our packages for your distribution to install Vidispine.

Install the packages

You can either install the packages from our repository, or download and install the packages from our download page.

Vidispine requires Java 11 which may not be available in the official repositories of older distributions. Install a third party repository providing Java 11 or upgrade to a newer distribution.

Install from official repository

To install Vidispine directly from our repository, head over to the repository page and follow the instructions.

Initialize the database

Create and give Vidispine access to an empty database:
```
$ psql -c "CREATE USER vidispine PASSWORD 'vidispine'";
$ psql -c "CREATE DATABASE vidispine OWNER vidispine";
```
On MySQL, make sure to use UTF-8:
```
CREATE DATABASE vidispine CHARSET utf8 COLLATE utf8_bin;
```
On Microsoft SQL Server create the database with a case-sensitive collation. As Vidispine consequently is using unicode (NVARCHAR) columns you do not need to care about the character set or code page.
```
CREATE DATABASE vidispine COLLATE Latin1_General_CS_AS
```
Snapshot isolation must be enabled for Vidispine to operate properly. Execute these commands directly after creating the database:
```
ALTER DATABASE vidispine SET ALLOW_SNAPSHOT_ISOLATION ON
GO
ALTER DATABASE vidispine SET READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT ON
GO
```
Ensure that TCP/IP is enabled for your server.

Modify the configuration file accordingly:

$ vi /etc/vidispine/server.yaml

PostgreSQL:

database:
  driverClass: org.postgresql.Driver
  url: jdbc:postgresql://localhost/vidispine
  user: vidispine
  password: vidispine

MySQL:

database:
  driverClass: com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
  url: jdbc:mysql://localhost/vidispine
  user: vidispine
  password: vidispine

Microsoft SQL Server:

database:
  driverClass: com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerDriver
  url: jdbc:sqlserver://localhost:1433;instanceName=SQLEXPRESS;databaseName=vidispine
  user: vidispine
  password: vidispine

Initialize and migrate the database:

$ vidispine db ping # verify connection
$ vidispine db check # verify if tables exists (they shouldn't)
$ vidispine db migrate
$ vidispine db check # should succeed

The /usr/bin/vidispine command is simply an alias to java -jar /usr/share/vidispine/server/vidispine-server.jar that is provided by the vidispine-server package.

Start the services

Use systemd to start the services:

$ systemctl start solr transcoder vidispine

Wait for Vidispine to start and then run APIinit to create the system metadata fields and the admin user.
```
$ # wait for 8080 to become available, and then
$ curl -X POST localhost:8080/APIinit
```
APIinit is a migration step that must be run manually. It will be made part of the migration command in the future.
To verify that Vidispine is running, access http://localhost:8080/API/version using curl or HTTPie, or directly in your browser. The default admin password is admin.
```
$ curl -X GET "localhost:8080/API/version" -uadmin:admin
```

Troubleshooting

If the Vidispine service fails, then check the syslog or journal for errors:
```
$ less /var/log/syslog
```
```
$ journalctl -xn
```
If the service dies, or never becomes available for some reason, then check the server log:
```
$ less /var/log/vidispine/server.log
```
If the service fails to start with a “UnsupportedClassVersionError: Unsupported major.minor version 51.0”, then make sure that the default system Java version is 7+ and not 6 or lower.
```
$ sudo update-alternatives --config java
```

Configure Vidispine

Finally, you will need to configure Vidispine.