Our library is OJS-curious these days, so I thought I’d set up a test instance so that we can kick the tires. This post is a quick summary of the steps needed to get this working:

1. Install KVM and virt-manager (and dependencies) on my laptop, to create and manage virtual machines.
2. Spend quite a while debugging virt-manager, which was throwing an error. After a lot of digging, I realized I needed to enable virtualization in the BIOS.
3. Create a VM using the virt-manager GUI. I wanted to do this project in a VM because I really didn’t want to bork my daily setup; a VM solves this problem very nicely.
4. Install Debian bookworm as the guest OS. This took forever because (a) Debian installs are slow, (b) my laptop is not high powered, and (c) I provisioned the VM very minimally. I did some yoga while it whirred.
5. Boot up the guest OS and install PHP and PostgreSQL.
6. Install some more PHP dependencies: both those specified by OJS, and some others needed to support PostgreSQL.
7. Set up the database, with the help of claude.ai :)
8. Run the development server that is included with OJS, and do the required setup by loading the configuration page on localhost. The installation process then kicks off.
9. Answer a few more questions, and voilà! Up and running!

I think this took me about four hours altogether, but I bet you could dispatch it more quickly!

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