Debian Installation Notes for beancounter

On a Debian system, the following steps are required for beancounter to run:

0. In case you are upgrading from an older installation of beancounter,
   run the script update_beancounter to add some columns to the tables.

1. Install PostgreSQL [or MySQL or SQLite]

      root# apt-get install postgresql

   which will also install postgresql-client and libpgsql2,

   Configure postgresql with the defaults (ie SQL_ASCII) encoding and ISO
   datestyle is my preference, others datestyles might or might not work.

   Postgresql is what I use on my development system. If you have experience
   with MySQL, use that backend. 

   SQLite may be the very easiest to setup as it is file-based. The preferred 
   SQLite version is now SQLite3 but the previous version is still supported
   in both setup_beancounter and beancounter itself.

2. Install all the other Perl packages required by beancounter:

      root# apt-get install libdbd-pg-perl libdbi-perl

   and the other packages. But 'apt-get install beancounter' should have
   taken care of that anyway.

3. Configure postgres to let the user as which you are running beancounter
   create database etc:

      root# su - postgres     
      postgres:~> createuser -d edd
      Enter user's postgres ID or RETURN to use unix user ID: 1000 ->
      Is user "edd" a superuser? (y/n) y
      WARNING: Any user who can add users can also modify the system catalog
      createuser: edd was successfully added

   Note that the superuser rights might not be required, however it is
   *important* to use the -d option to createuser. 

4. Configure postgres to allow TCP/IP connections by uncommenting the 
   following line in /etc/postgresql/postgresql.conf

       # TCP/IP access is allowed by default, but the default access given in
       # pg_hba.conf will permit it only from localhost, not other machines.
      tcpip_socket = true

   [ Historically, this option was in the file postmaster.init:
       # PGALLOWTCPIP=no  
       PGALLOWTCPIP=yes 
     but this seems to have changed with the 7.* releases of Postgresql. ]

   Also ensure that network access is granted via /etc/posgresql/pg_hba_conf:

     # TYPE  DATABASE    USER  IP-ADDRESS     IP-MASK          METHOD

     local   all         all                                   trust
     host    all         all   127.0.0.1      255.0.0.0        trust
     host    all         all   192.168.1.0    255.255.255.0    ident sameuser

   which enables me to have access from the same machine (127.0.0.1) for
   whoever is on it, as well as from users owning databases from whereever
   they are on my local LAN.

   Lastly, restarting the postgresql daemon:

       root# /etc/init.d/postgresql restart    

5. Install beancounter 

       root# dpkg -i beancounter_0.1.0_all.deb 
       Selecting previously deselected package beancounter.
       (Reading database ... 54112 files and directories currently installed.)
       Unpacking beancounter (from beancounter_0.1.0_all.deb) ...
       Setting up beancounter (0.1.0) ...

6. As the user running beancounter, run 'setup_beancounter' to initialise
   the tables and run an example report.

   setup_beancounter can create and populate databases for PostgreSQL, MySQL
   SQLite (the current version 3.*) and SQLite2 (the previous version, with
   an incompatible format).

7. That's it!