The Connfa open source suite looks like a great set of tools for conference management. It consists of a web application, a central CMS integration server, and mobile applications for both Android and iOS. I was looking at how one could use the mobile applications. The mobile applications get their data from the integration server, which provides an API. So, I looked at how to set it up and document my findings in this post.

The Connfa CMS server is a php application that uses a MySQL database. To begin with, the documentation here is quite good: http://connfa.com/documentation/. However, as is usually seen, it takes a few tweaks to deploy it. These steps are therefore, Fedora 28 specific.

On Fedora, one needs to use php71 from remi's repository: https://blog.remirepo.net/pages/Config-en

sudo dnf install php71 composer php71-php-mysqlnd mariadb httpd mariadb-server php71-php-xml
sudo systemctl start php71-php-fpm
sudo systemctl start httpd
sudo systemctl start mysqld
module load php71
php --version

This is because the tool doesn't work with the latest version of php that's in Fedora 28. The tool also has a bug or two, so I used this fork that appears to have a bugfix:

https://github.com/d-i-t-a/connfa-integration-server/tree/develop

Then, one must set up Mariadb as explained here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MariaDB. Note that Mariadb is an Open source MySQL implementation.

One must also create a database as explained in the wiki page, and a user that connfa can use, which must match the values in the env file.

On Fedora, I enabled the UserDir httpd extension, and placed the connfa-integration-server in ~/public_html/, since I didn't want to work as root in /var/www/html all the time. httpd will needs to be started and enabled:

sudo systemctl start httpd; sudo systemctl enable httpd

On Fedora, Selinux must be asked to allow access to UserDirs:

sudo setsebool -P httpd_read_user_content 1
sudo setsebool -P httpd_unified 1
sudo setsebool -P httpd_can_network_connect_db 1
sudo setsebool -P httpd_can_network_connect 1

One can follow the steps from here next: http://connfa.com/integration-server/server-requirements

I also run composer update to update the php bits.

Then, update the env file and so on as explained here: http://connfa.com/integration-server/install/

php artisan key:generate #sets the keys in the env file
php artisan password:change --name=admin --password=connfa18

The site should be accessible at http://localhost/~<username>/public/login/ The username is admin@test.com here.

The API is accessible at: http://localhost/~<username>/public/api/v2/cns-2018/checkUpdates

I did have quite a few issues with permissions, but then I'm neither a web developer nor a server administrator, so my skills in the department are rather limited.

I'll look at the Android application next, and hopefully, I'll be able to sync it up with the CMS server.