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Installation

While the Sunrise Cemetery Management System (CMS) can run on a high end server, that is by no means a requirement. Most user workstations are sufficient for modest installations.

Minimum Requirements

The system must meet the minimum requirements for Node.js, which is able to run on budget hardware.

More is better đź’Ş, however under stress tests, the application peaked at the following:

Step 1: Install Node.js 20 or better and npm

Node.js is a JavaScript runtime environment. Sunrise CMS is built to run on Node.js, and is regularly tested on the currently supported LTS versions.

npm is a package manager that contains all the prerequisites for Sunrise CMS.

Node.js can run on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Installers on the Node.js website include npm. Node.js and npm are also available in most package managers.

> sudo apt install nodejs
> sudo apt install npm

Step 2: Download Sunrise CMS

Download a release

For production environments, using releases is recommended. Releases are available on GitHub.

Download using git

Note that git downloads may contain incomplete features that are still under development.

Git is the version control system that manages the code for Sunrise CMS.

Git can run on Windows, Mac, and Linux. You can install it using an installer from the Git website, or from most package managers.

> sudo apt install git

Once git is ready, open a command line, and navigate to the folder where the application will reside.

> git clone https://github.com/cityssm/sunrise-cms

Step 3: Install the dependencies

> cd sunrise-cms
> npm install

In a perfect world, all of the dependencies will install successfully. There are however a couple dependencies that are occasionally difficult, depending on the platform you are installing on. If an error occurs during the install, the first recommendation is to delete the node_modules folder, and rerun npm install. If errors persist, here are the more common ones and their fixes.

Error Installing better-sqlite3

On some platforms, the better-sqlite3 needs to compile itself. When that is the case, it uses Python to do so. If compilation is necessary and Python is unavailable, the installation will fail.

See the common troubleshooting steps for better-sqlite3 for more troubleshooting steps.

Error Installing puppeteer

Puppeteer is used by Sunrise CMS to generate PDFs. Installation may fail on platforms that no longer support the current versions of Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Installation may also fail if the platform is missing certain system packages that are required by the web browsers. This issue is more common on Linux platforms that lack a desktop environment.

See the system requirements for Puppeteer for Puppeteer’s requirements, and the requirements of the browsers it uses.

Step 4: Create a config.js file

It is recommended to copy the testing.config.js file to get started.

> cp data/testing.config.js data/config.js

See the config.js documentation for help customizing your configuration, and specifically “Logging in for the First Time” documentation for help configuring authentication.

Step 5: Start the application

Start Using npm

> npm start

Start Using node

> node ./index.js

Start as a Windows Service

The included windowsService-install.bat script simplifies the process of keeping the application running in a Windows environment by creating a service that can start with the hosting server.

> windowsService-install

Step 5a: The application won’t start!

If the application won’t start, it can be run with debug output using the following command.

> npm run dev:live