Installing Virtuoso Open Source on a Mac Mini

Part 2 of the “Things PhD students do on a saturday night” series: Having successfully installed 4store on our brand new Mac Mini running OSX 10.7 (Lion), I went on to tackle the next candidate for our triple-store-o-rama: Virtuoso (Open Source Edition).

I followed mostly the instructions on the Virtuoso wiki, which are not quite as nice as the 4store ones, but managed to get me through the installation process without major incidences: http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/dataspace/dav/wiki/Main/VOSMake

A short and clear overview of the installation process can be found on Kingsley Idehen’s blog.

Here we go:

Hardware: Apple Mac Mini (running Mac OS X Lion 10.7), out of the box

Install dependencies

If you’ve previously installed 4store, some of these might already be installed. You’ll also need fink, which I’ve described in the previous post. Using fink install, install the following libs:

• autoconf
• automake
• libtool
• flex
• bison (which will also install gawk)
• gawk
• gperf
• m4
• make
• OpenSSL

If one of them won’t install, check with fink list pkgname what the alternative package name is and whether it’s already installed. If it’s already installed, this will be indicated by an “i” in the first column of the results that fink list returns.

Install Virtuoso

1) Download Virtuoso Open Source version:
curl -O -L http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/virtuoso/virtuoso/6.1.5/virtuoso-opensource-6.1.5.tar.gz
(-L is necessary to ensure curl follows the redirect to the respective mirror on SourceForge, took me a while to figure that out…)

2) Unpack the tarball:
tar -xvzf virtuoso-opensource-6.1.5.tar.gz

3) Set compiler flags (check out the Make FAQ for a list of settings on other systems)

• CFLAGS=”-O -m64 -mmacosx-version-min=10.7″
• export CFLAGS

4) Configure and install:

• ./configure
• make
• sudo make install (the instructions say it installs to /usr/local/ by default, the resulting path is /usr/local/virtuoso-opensource)

5) Add path to the bin directory to the PATH environment varibale in ~/.profile:

Open text editor and add:
PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/virtuoso-opensource/bin/

Starting Virtuoso and importing data from a file

1) Add directory which contains data file to virtuoso.ini:
sudo emacs /usr/local/virtuoso-opensource/var/lib/virtuoso/db/virtuoso.ini
>> Add the directory path to DirsAllowed parameter, e.g. in our case /Users/fishdelish/fishbench/tests/testfish.n3

2) Start the Virtuoso server:

• cd /usr/local/virtuoso-opensource/var/lib/virtuoso/db/
• sudo virtuoso-t -f (or use sudo virtuoso-t -f & if you want to start it independently from the shell you’re using)
• (virtuoso-t will read the virtuoso.ini file in this directory)

3) Import data:
(see some information and screenshots here:) http://www.proxml.be/users/paul/weblog/3876f/

Connect to DB to get an SQL prompt:

• isql <HOST>[:<PORT>] -U username -P password
• or simply isql 1111 myuser mypassword, this connects to the default port 1111

Import data (from n3 format, otherwise use DB.DBA.RDF_LOAD_RDFXML_MT from RDF/XML)

• DB.DBA.TTLP_MT(file_to_string_output (‘/Users/fishdelish/fishbench/tests/testfish.n3′),”,’http://www.owl.cs.man.ac.uk/testfish&#8217;);

4) Access via http: 

• http://localhost:8890/ (start page)
• http://localhost:8890/conductor/ (default user and password is dba/dba)
• http://localhost:8890:8890/sparql (the SPARQL endpoint)

Shutting down the server
Open SQL prompt and use command SHUTDOWN;

When the server isn’t shut down properly, there might be problems starting up next time. Manually removing virtuoso.lck in the virtuoso/db directory can solve this.