About 18 months ago I got my first VPS and figured out how to install RED5, the free open-source alternative to Adobe’s Flash Media Server. It’s a great alternative and the price (0.00 $) is just right. A few weeks ago I decided to upgrade my VPS plan at Vexxhost to a cloud server which meant I had to install everything all over again. Including RED5. I then decided to write a tutorial that includes all the steps needed to get RED5 up and running on your CentOS server.

It takes about 20-40 minutes depending on how much of a brainless copy-paster you are. And on that last note I’d like to add that I take no responsibility if anything goes wrong. These steps are the ones I followed and worked great for me. If for some obscure reason you do something that might mess up your server, I’m not going to take the heat for that.
So, how about it? Let’s get started, shall we?

Requirements

1. SSH access to your VPS
2. The root login to your server
3. Basic knowledge of Java servers, SVN, etc
4. A clue: If you don’t have a clue what you’re about to do here, it means you don’t need to do this and thus don’t need this tutorial.

Let’s go

Prepare your server

JAVA

Red5 is a JAVA server. So you’ll need to have JAVA installed and running on your server. Check if you have JAVA installed by just using the following command:

java

If your server responds with information about the java command, you have java installed. Check to see if you have a valid version of JAVA running by using the following command:

java -version

The first line of the response should be something like “java version “1.6.0_20“. The really important bit here is 1.6.  If that is the case, you can skip this step. If it’s not, you’ll need to update Java. I can’t tell you how to do that. You’ll have to Google that. If you got a response similar to ‘command not found‘, you’ll need to install JAVA.
Installing JAVA on CentOS can be done using Yum. Like this:

yum -y install java-1.6.0-openjdk java-1.6.0-openjdk-devel

Just sit back and watch the lines of text scroll by. This could take a while.
When the scrolling ends: tap yourself on the back. You just installed JAVA on your server. One step closer to success.

RED5 will run on JAVA. We will download the sources later on and then build the RED5 application ourselves. We will build the source using ANT.

ANT

First we need to check if  you have ANT installed. You can check this out by typing:

ant --help

If you get a manual page, you’re in the green. You can skip this step. If you don’t, you’ll have to install ANT. First off let’s change to another directory.

cd /usr/src

We need to download the latest ANT version. You can find the most recent versions here. The one provided in the following step is the most current one at the time of writing. Copy the url and enter it in the following command. This will download the file to your server in the directory /usr/src/.

wget http://opensource.become.com/apache/ant/binaries/apache-ant-1.8.2-bin.tar.gz

This is some kind of strange zip format. We need to uncompress this. (Remember to update the filename in the next step to the one you just downloaded in the previous step)

tar zxvf apache-ant-1.8.2-bin.tar.gz

So now we have all these files in the uncompressed folder, we need to move it to a save place… (Again keep in mind to change the foldername to your version of ANT you just downloaded, 2 steps ago)

mv apache-ant-1.8.2/ /usr/local/ant

So now we have JAVA installed, and ANT is in place. We need to make sure there are some environment variables set. These are global variables with paths to different binaries or applications. ANT and JAVA will need those. Copy and paste the following commands, one by one, BUT MAKE SURE the quotes are valid charachters. I noticed that copy/pasting from websites might mess this up. I suggest you take the time and replace them by hand before actually executing these commands.
export ANT_HOME=/usr/local/ant
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/ant/bin
export CLASSPATH=.:$JAVA_HOME/lib/classes.zip
echo 'export ANT_HOME=/usr/local/ant' >> /etc/bashrc
echo 'export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java' >> /etc/bashrc
echo 'export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/ant/bin' >> /etc/bashrc
echo 'export CLASSPATH=.:$JAVA_HOME/lib/classes.zip' >> /etc/bashrc

All set? Good!
Okay, now ANT and JAVA should know enough about each other to get started. So now we essentially have everything to build the actual RED5 server except for the RED5 source. We will fetch the latest release from the SVN repository at Google Code. For that we will need SVN.

SVN

Let’s see if we have SVN installed:

svn --help

If you get the man pages, you’re free to skip this step. If you don’t: Let’s make it happen!

yum install subversion

If the SVN installation works right away: You’re done here. Skip to the next part. You might get an error like “Error: Missing Dependency: perl(URI) >= 1.17 is needed by package subversion“. That means you’re missing an RPM. Sucks, right? Let’s take care of this…

If your server is a 32bit machine, do the following:

wget ftp://ftp.pbone.net/mirror/archive.fedoraproject.org/fedora/linux/releases/7/Everything/i386/os/Fedora/perl-URI-1.35-3.noarch.rpm

If you’re on a 64bit machine:

wget ftp://ftp.pbone.net/mirror/archive.fedoraproject.org/fedora/linux/releases/7/Everything/x86_64/os/Fedora/perl-URI-1.35-3.noarch.rpm

Okay, so now you got that new RPM file. You’ll need to add this to the internal list of RPMs (I don’t even know what it’s called). That’ll take care of the error message mentioned above.

rpm -i perl-URI-1.35-3.noarch.rpm

You might get a warning after inserting this command. Don’t worry, I’ve seen it too and yet the world didn’t implode. So ignore that Try installing subversion again using the following command:

yum install subversion

It will ask you if it’s okay to download all this stuff. Of course it is. Type ‘y’ and hit enter to watch the server work away. You should end up with a ‘Complete!‘ message in the end. If you see the ‘Complete!‘ message: It’s okay to feel happy about yourself. You have now subversion running on your server. Or at least a client (from what I got). Getting closer!

Actually installing the RED5 server

Source

It’s finally time to get down to business: RED5. This is why we’re here!
Let’s make sure we’re in the right folder:

cd /usr/src

Let’s get the RED5 source:

svn checkout http://red5.googlecode.com/svn/java/server/trunk/ red5

This will fetch the complete Red5 source and save it in a new folder called, red5 (so in /usr/src/red5)
Now that we have the source, let’s move it to /usr/local/ using

mv red5 /usr/local/

Now let’s dive into the red5 source folder

cd /usr/local/red5

This is the folder where all the source files reside. From here on, we prepare and build the red5 source… This should be interesting. Run these commands one at a time:

ant prepare
ant dist

There’s a (I think the scientific term is) crapload of text going to scroll across the terminal window. Don’t freak out… Just enjoy the show. This is where you call your friends and make them watch the screen as the mass of text freakishly scrolls over your screen. This makes you look very smart. It also makes you look nerdy, but that’s okay. You kind of are… You _ARE_ in fact building a RED5 server… Ohwell… Being a nerd is cool. We can do mighty cool stuff. Let’s wait for the build to complete. After a few minutes you should end up with the last line in your terminal window looking like this:

BUILD SUCCESSFUL

That’s good news! This means that you now have a working RED5 build!
Let’s copy the conf directory from the dist folder to the current directory. (Don’t ask me why… Turns out this is important)

cp -r dist/conf .

Okay, so right now we have a build of the RED5 server. As far as servers go: This one should be ready to rock. Let’s check this out!

./red5.sh

You should get lots of more text scrolling across the screen (again, looks so harcore!). What this does is, it runs the RED5 server. If you wanna make sure your server is actually running, you should be able to see the webroot of Red5 when hitting your server at port 5080 (yourserver.com:5080)(watch the firewall Add ports 5080 and 1935 to the whitelist)
Note that the server is currently only running as long as you keep that terminal window open. Once you close it RED5 stops running. Let’s make sure RED5 can run on its own from now on. Hit CTRL+C to stop the process. (if you visit yourserver.com:5080 again, it should tell you the browser can’t open the page at that address)

Service

We will create a little service script for RED5. Let’s start here:

vi /etc/init.d/red5

You’ll be dropped into vi, a basic UNIX text editor.
Here we will write down the init script that will give us a simple API to start, stop, restart the server and get the status of the server.

Enter the following script into vi. Note: Copy pasting might be buggy, so first copy/paste this script into a local texteditor and make sure all quotes are normal quotes. I ran into this problem. For easy measure: You can download the script here. This version is copy/past-safe

#!/bin/bash
# For RedHat and cousins:
# chkconfig: 2345 85 85
# description: Red5 flash streaming server
# processname: red5
# Created By: Sohail Riaz (sohaileo@gmail.com)

PROG=red5
RED5_HOME=/usr/local/red5
DAEMON=$RED5_HOME/$PROG.sh
PIDFILE=/var/run/$PROG.pid

# Source function library
. /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions

[ -r /etc/sysconfig/red5 ] && . /etc/sysconfig/red5

RETVAL=0

case “$1″ in
start)
echo -n $”Starting $PROG: ”
cd $RED5_HOME
$DAEMON >/dev/null 2>/dev/null &
RETVAL=$?
if [ $RETVAL -eq 0 ]; then
echo $! > $PIDFILE
touch /var/lock/subsys/$PROG
fi
[ $RETVAL -eq 0 ] && success $”$PROG startup” || failure $”$PROG startup”
echo
;;
stop)
echo -n $”Shutting down $PROG: ”
killproc -p $PIDFILE
RETVAL=$?
echo
[ $RETVAL -eq 0 ] && rm -f /var/lock/subsys/$PROG
;;
restart)
$0 stop
$0 start
;;
status)
status $PROG -p $PIDFILE
RETVAL=$?
;;
*)
echo $”Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart|status}”
RETVAL=1
esac

exit $RETVAL

Once you’ve pasted the text, hit ESC. Then type the following to save and quit vi:

:wq

On the bottom of the screen the ‘:wq‘ should appear (in a status bar style fashion)
Hit enter. Vi should close and the terminal window should look like before. To make sure you saved the init script correctly, just do this once again:

vi /etc/init.d/red5

You should now see the script you pasted earlier. If you don’t, you haven’t saved the script before properly. Go back a few steps and try again. If the script got saved, just enter the following to close vi again:

:q

Since this is unix land, we need to make sure this init script has permissions to actually be executed. Let’s do this! Do it using chmod, like this:

chmod +x /etc/init.d/red5

Now we should be able to start red5 by using this script. Give this a shot

/etc/init.d/red5 start

If your server responds by writing starting Red5: [ OK ], you’re golden. Let’s check the status!

/etc/init.d/red5 status

You should see something like

red5 (pid 11232) is running...

This means that the RED5 server is running on its own. We could close this terminal window and the RED5 server would stay up and running. That’s looking mighty good, right!?
However, whenever we reboot the VPS, the RED5 server won’t start by itself…yet. You know where I’m going with this, right?
In order for RED5 to start when the server boots, we need to do some chkconfig magic. First we need to add the RED5 service to chkconfig:

chkconfig --add red5

Now we need to tell chkconfig that red5 should start asap when booting:

chkconfig red5 on

That should do it… Red5 is installed, you have a simple way of restarting the RED5 service and it starts as soon as possible whenever the server starts. I’d say that’s all we need. Let’s have a little applause for yourself. You did it! You have RED5 running on your server! Now go and have fun with it

Thank you

I think I (= we) should thank a lot of people and communities for what has just been done. All of these apps, binaries, sources and files have been shared for your freedom of using, experimenting and building apps with it. You didn’t have to pay anything for it. You just had to figure out how to use it. A little bit of gratitude is well in order.

At the same time I want to give credit to all of the people who published tutorials and manuals on their own site about how to install RED5 and other apps needed for this to work. Listed below are all the sources I referenced in order to compile this complete guide to RED5-awesomeness.

• http://blog.umbralechoes.com/2010/09/13/how-to-install-red5-0-9-1-on-centos-5/
• http://opensource.become.com/apache/ant/binaries/ 
• http://linuxwindowsmaster.com/how-to-install-subversion-client-on-linux-server/ 
• http://code.google.com/p/red5/source/checkout 
• http://www.sohailriaz.com/how-to-install-red5-server-on-centos-53/ 
• http://www.cs.colostate.edu/helpdocs/vi.html 
• http://linuxcommand.org/man_pages/chkconfig8.html

Serge Jespers berichtte vandaag dat de eerste alpha versie van de runtime voor Linux beschikbaar is. Op deze manier wordt het bekende open-source platform weer toegankelijker! Verder is er vandaag ook een update beschikbaar geworden voor de Flex Builder voor Linux. Deze zou AIR support moeten geven zodat developers ook op Linux aan de slag kunnen gaan!

En om het plaatje af te maken, maakt Adobe bekend dat ze zich bij de Linux Foundation aansluiten.

Dit lijkt mij heel goed en fijn nieuws!