Installation

The installation process is very much a point a click affair. There's a good level of feedback with it, so when something is wrong/missing it explains it all rather well. The down side of this is that I don't know how well it will work in an auto-deployment sort of way...

Prerequisits

• Apache
• php - mostly standard stuff, the only thing you may have to install is a few modules that make the API work e.g. php5-curl, but you can do that during the install.
• MySQL - Make sure you have a DB ready, you may as well call it redcap.
• phpMyAdmin - Alas this really is required; the install process has a large SQL statement that needs to be run, but it is not properly escaped, so if you run it from the command line it will fail. << NOT THE CASE AS OF VERSION 5.
• PEAR - Including php-auth and php-db

The install

The source code is here:

​https://iwg.devguard.com/trac/redcap/wiki/Downloads

Now the question of whether to use the active branch or the stable one is a toughie. The stable branch is only supported for 6 months, so it would have to be upgraded at least that often. There will be numerous bug fixes during that time, so it will have to be upgraded regardless (unless you think the NHS network is so secure you don't care!), in which case we could use the active branch...

Stick the directory in the web root that I assume you have set up in Apache.

Navigate to ​http://hostname/install.php

And follow the steps. If you got a blank screen then you probably need to set the settings in database.php so it can connect to your DB.

Post install set up

Authentication

By default a site_admin is set as the main super user, set yourself a user account up, make yourself a super user, then change the authentication to be table based according to what is written here:

​https://iwg.devguard.com/trac/redcap/wiki/ChangingAuthenticationMethod

You have to do it this way and now, doing it later will probably bork your install...

As of 18 November 2013, serious consideration being given to changing the REDCap configuration to use LDAP authentication, referencing the UHL Active Directory. Main driver for this (beside it generally being a good thing) is the commissioning of the two laptops for REDCap to be used in the GRAPHIC 2 study. Issue would be that the laptops would be unable to reach the LDAP server when off-site. Possible solution - OpenLDAP servers on the embedded VMs, replicating just the OU for REDCap from the UHL AD. Pending further work, the laptops continue to use table-based authentication for now.

Image files

Within each installation, in the /Resources/images/ directory there are various logos, etc. Replacing redcaplogo.gif and redcaplogo_small.gif with alternate logos helps to identify the test system and also the laptop LOCAL systems. Each time a new version is installed, the image files will need to be copied over to the new directory structure.

Long term support

Upgrading - The upgrade process is actually quite painless; you stick the new directory in the root directory and open an upgrade.php page which does all the DB schema upgrades etc then you are done. Unless it breaks of course....