Installing on Ubuntu and Debian

Danger

• Ubuntu ISO can be downloaded from https://ubuntu.com/download/server. Please always choose an LTS Server version.
• Debian ISO can be downloaded from https://www.debian.org/download.

Tip

This installation guide works for other Ubuntu / Debian-based distributions like Linux Mint.

This guide has been validated with the following:

• Ubuntu 20.04
• Ubuntu 22.04
• Debian 11
• Debian 12

Caution

To install OpenKM, the server needs access to download.openkm.com and update.openkm.com; please verify before installing.

If you are using a proxy to access the Internet, please see Using the installer.

Preliminaries

Ensure you have enough disk space to install OpenKM and store the document repository:

$ df -h

Once verified, create the “openkm” user:

$ adduser openkm

If Java 8 is still not installed, please install the following:

$ apt install openjdk-8-jre

Caution

If Java 8 packages are not available in your distro repositories, you need to download and install them from Eclipse Temurin.

Caution

OpenKM currently only works with Java 8, so once the installation process is completed, verify the default version is Java 8:

$ java -version
openjdk version "1.8.0_352"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_352-8u352-ga-1~22.04-b08)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.352-b08, mixed mode)

Otherwise, set Java 8 as the default:

$ update-alternatives --config java

If you do not have any other preference for a database, we suggest installing MariaDB:

$ apt install mariadb-server

After that, check if the MariaDB service is already started:

$ systemctl status mariadb

Installing OpenKM

You can choose between installing OpenKM at “/home/openkm” or “/opt.” In any case, go to the selected path and download the installer.

It’s a text-based installer, so you must execute it from the console as root. This is because it needs to install package dependencies and configure OpenKM as a service:

$ java -jar OKMInstaller.jar

Remember to check Using the installer if you are using a proxy to access the Internet.

When the installation process has finished, please ensure that Java 8 is the default:

$ java -version

Otherwise, set it as default:

$ update-alternatives --config java

Once verified, start the required services:

$ systemctl start xvfb openkm

You can verify the status of these services this way:

$ systemctl status xvfb openkm

More info at:

• How can I install Java 8 on Debian 11 (Bullseye)?
• Install Java JDK and JRE on Debian 8

Post-installation checklist

To verify the installation was successful, please use this checklist:

• Verify the default Java is Java 8.
• Verify you can access OpenKM from another computer.
• Try to log in with the default okmAdmin / admin user and password.
• Upload a Word document and check if the thumbnail is generated and the preview is shown.

Troubleshooting

If you have a problem with thumbnail generation, please verify that you have the ImageMagick package installed and that the “convert” application works. 

Download a sample image from Sample PNG Image and try to generate a thumbnail:

$ wget https://www.sample-videos.com/img/Sample-png-image-1mb.png
$ convert -thumbnail '80x80>' -background 'white' -flatten Sample-png-image-1mb.png sample-output.png