Quick and Dirty ResourceSpace Set Up

ResourceSpace

Digital Asset Management (DAM) is something I have some experience with in working at Sandbox Studios and film production, but the technology behind it has always fascinated me. A friend of mine just start up a production studio and so I figured I'd see which DAM he found to be useful in real world applications. Of course, I'm always first and foremost interested in Open Source Solutions. Some Open Source DAMs are catered to archival purposes (such as ResourceSpace), while others are production-centric (like Tactic).

ResourceSpace struck me like a first good forray to dive into because it's open source, relies on your traditional LAMP stack, and it's regularly updated with the assistance of an active community.

 So if you'd like to demo it yourself, here's the quick and dirty set up using Ubuntu Server 12.04LTS in VirtualBox w/ 4gb of Memory and 50gb of storage. As well under "Networking" I set port fowarding (leaving the connection under NAT) for port 8080 host to 80 guest (http), and 2222 host to 22 guest (ssh). The steps listed are pretty much taken straight from the ResourceSpace wiki with a few exceptions.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install apache2 mysql-server php5 php5-dev php5-gd php5-mysql subversion
sudo apt-get install vim nano imagemagick
sudo apt-get install ghostscript antiword xpdf ffmpeg postfix libimage-exiftool-perl cron wget

So now we have our dependencies covered, now let's go ahead and get this party started by using subversion to download and ResourceSpace. 

cd /var/www
sudo svn co http://svn.montala.net/svn/resourcespace
cd resourcespace
sudo mkdir filestore
sudo chmod 777 filestore

So here we need to create a mysql db, then change permissions for the 'include' directory which contains a little tidbit we'll need to modify before things get interesting.

mysql -u root -p
create database resourcespace;
quit
sudo chmod -R 777 include
cd include
sudo vi config.default.php
 
This file will have in capitol letters "DO NOT ALTER THIS FILE", but, alas, we have to to fix a small issue with the current build. 

We need to modify line 39 of this file (use ':set number' in vim to show line numbers):

$baseurl="http://my.site:[port]/resourcespace"
SHOULD BE
$baseurl="http://[ip or domain]:[port]/resourcespace"

For testing/demo purposes however I simply use the following. Remember to use the IP address of your Host is using the actual IP and the host port.

$baseurl="http://localhost:8080/resourcespace"

From here you're pretty much ready to get started with the web interface. From here go to http:127.0.0.1:8080/resourcespace in your web browser and you'll be guided through the rest.