This guide assumes that...

A) You're running Ubuntu 12.04.
B) You will only use NginX for MusicBrainz.

This may work on other versions of Ubuntu, but it's possible that package names will change and confusion will creep in so you'll need to make a few changes here and there to suit if required if that is the case.

We will do this whole process as root (so you'll need to sudo su first) and we will be installing MusicBrainz into /opt/musicbrainz to keep everything nice and tidy. The steps are all numbered so you can easily keep track of the process.

1. Install all the packages we will need.
apt-get install postgresql postgresql-server-dev-all postgresql-contrib libpq-dev git-core memcached build-essential libxml2-dev libpq-dev libexpat1-dev libdb-dev libicu-dev nginx perl

2. Now we need to copy the MusicBrainz software to our server.
cd /opt git clone git://github.com/metabrainz/musicbrainz-server.git musicbrainz cd musicbrainz

3. Time to create our preferences file. First we copy the template and then edit it to suit.
cp lib/DBDefs.pm.sample lib/DBDefs.pm

Now edit these specific lines in lib/DBDefs.pm to reflect the following:
sub REPLICATION_TYPE { RT_SLAVE } sub WEB_SERVER { "myserver.com" } sub DB_STAGING_SERVER { 0 } sub CATALYST_DEBUG { 0 } sub DEVELOPMENT_SERVER { 1 } sub EMAIL_BUGS { 'myemail@myserver.com' }
They'll be commented out so you just need to uncomment them and change the parts that don't match what is written above. Don't forget to replace myserver.com with your own domain name.

4. Now we need to create the dependency list of Perl modules. For some reason Musicbrainz doesn't come with one so this has been compiled mostly through trial and error! Paste the following into a file named "cpanfile" in the musicbrainz folder.
requires 'Algorithm::Diff'; requires 'Algorithm::Merge'; requires 'Authen::Passphrase'; requires 'CGI::Expand'; requires 'CSS::Minifier'; requires 'Cache::Memcached'; requires 'Cache::Memcached::Fast'; requires 'Cache::Memory'; requires 'Captcha::reCAPTCHA'; requires 'Catalyst::Action::RenderView' => '0.09'; requires 'Catalyst::Authentication::Credential::HTTP' => '1.009'; requires 'Catalyst::Plugin::Authentication' => '0.10011'; requires 'Catalyst::Plugin::Cache'; requires 'Catalyst::Plugin::Cache::HTTP'; requires 'Catalyst::Plugin::ErrorCatcher'; requires 'Catalyst::Plugin::I18N' => '0.09'; requires 'Catalyst::Plugin::StackTrace'; requires 'Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding' => '1.2'; requires 'Catalyst::Runtime' => '5.90007'; requires 'Catalyst::View::TT' => '0.29'; requires 'Class::MOP'; requires 'Clone'; requires 'Cwd'; requires 'DBD::Pg' => '2.11.8'; requires 'DBI' => '1.607'; requires 'DBIx::Connector'; requires 'Data::Compare'; requires 'Data::Dumper::Concise'; requires 'Data::OptList'; requires 'Data::Page' => '2.01'; requires 'Data::UUID::MT' => '0.004'; requires 'Date::Calc' => '5.8'; requires 'DateTime::Format::Duration' => '1.03'; requires 'DateTime::Format::ISO8601'; requires 'DateTime::Format::Natural' => '0.96'; requires 'DateTime::Format::Pg' => '0.16004'; requires 'DateTime::TimeZone'; requires 'Digest::HMAC_SHA1' => '1.03'; requires 'Digest::MD5' => '2.36'; requires 'Digest::MD5::File'; requires 'Digest::SHA1' => '2.110'; requires 'Email::Address'; requires 'Email::MIME'; requires 'Email::MIME::Creator'; requires 'Email::Sender'; requires 'Email::Valid'; requires 'Encode::Detect' => '1.01'; requires 'Exception::Class' => '1.29'; requires 'FCGI'; requires 'FCGI::ProcManager'; requires 'File::Spec'; requires 'GnuPG' => '0.17'; requires 'HTML::FormHandler' => '0.40013'; requires 'HTML::Tiny' => '1.05'; requires 'HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath'; requires 'Hash::Merge'; requires 'IO::All'; requires 'JSON' => '2.14'; requires 'JSON::XS' => '2.27'; requires 'Javascript::Closure'; requires 'List::AllUtils'; requires 'List::MoreUtils' => '0.22'; requires 'List::UtilsBy' => '0.06'; requires 'Locale::Messages'; requires 'Locale::PO'; requires 'Log::Dispatch'; requires 'MRO::Compat' => '0.10'; requires 'Math::Random::Secure'; requires 'Method::Signatures::Simple'; requires 'Module::Pluggable' => '3.9'; requires 'Moose' => '2.0402'; requires 'MooseX::ABC' => '0.05'; requires 'MooseX::Clone'; requires 'MooseX::Getopt'; requires 'MooseX::MethodAttributes' => '0.24'; requires 'MooseX::Role::Parameterized' => '0.16'; requires 'MooseX::Runnable'; requires 'MooseX::Singleton'; requires 'MooseX::Types' => '0.16'; requires 'MooseX::Types::Structured' => '0.24'; requires 'MooseX::Types::URI' => '0.03'; requires 'Net::Amazon::AWSSign'; requires 'Net::Amazon::S3::Policy' => '0.1.2'; requires 'Net::CoverArtArchive'; requires 'Package::Stash' => '0.29'; requires 'Plack::Handler::FCGI'; requires 'Plack::Middleware::Debug'; requires 'REST::Utils' => '0.4'; requires 'Readonly' => '1.03'; requires 'Redis' => '1.961'; requires 'Set::Scalar'; requires 'Statistics::Basic' => '1.6602'; requires 'String::CamelCase'; requires 'String::ShellQuote' => '1.030'; requires 'String::TT' => '0.03'; requires 'Sys::Hostname'; requires 'Template::Plugin::Class'; requires 'Template::Plugin::JavaScript'; requires 'Template::Plugin::Map'; requires 'Template::Plugin::Math'; requires 'Text::MicroTemplate'; requires 'Text::Trim' => '1.02'; requires 'Text::Unaccent'; requires 'Text::WikiFormat' => '0.80'; requires 'Throwable'; requires 'Time::Duration'; requires 'TryCatch'; requires 'URI' => '1.50'; requires 'Unicode::ICU::Collator'; requires 'XML::Generator'; requires 'XML::Parser::Lite' => '0.714'; requires 'XML::RSS::Parser::Lite' => '0.10'; requires 'XML::SemanticDiff' => '1.0000'; requires 'XML::Simple' => '2.14'; requires 'XML::XPath';

5. Carton installs the above packages for us so that's next.
cpan Carton
Answer yes or the default to all (basically just hit enter if you're prompted for anything).

6. Install the Perl packages MusicBrainz needs.
carton install --deployment; carton install; carton install --deployment

7. MusicBrainz needs some special Postgresql modules so lets build and install those.
cd postgresql-musicbrainz-unaccent && make && make install; cd .. cd postgresql-musicbrainz-collate && make && make install; cd ..

8. Now we need to modify Postgres to allow MusicBrainz to log in.
Delete everything in /etc/postgresql/9.1/main/pg_hba.conf and replace it with the following line.
local all all trust
... and then restart Postgres...
service postgresql restart

9. Time to populate the MusicBrainz database with the latest information.
To do this, go to this repostitory and download mbdump-editor.tar.bz2, mbdump-derived.tar.bz2 and mbdump.tar.bz2 to your /opt/musicbrainz folder.

10. Then install them with the following command (this may take a while).
carton exec ./admin/InitDb.pl -- --createdb --import mbdump*.tar.bz2 --echo

11. Now to set up NginX. Open /etc/nginx/nginx.conf and replace the entire file with this content instead.
user www-data; worker_processes 2; pid /var/run/nginx.pid; events { worker_connections 1024; multi_accept on; use epoll; } http { include /etc/nginx/mime.types; default_type application/octet-stream; access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log; error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log; tcp_nodelay on; sendfile on; tcp_nopush on; keepalive_timeout 10; client_max_body_size 20M; client_header_buffer_size 128k; client_body_buffer_size 512k; large_client_header_buffers 4 16k; proxy_buffering on; proxy_buffer_size 4k; proxy_buffers 4 32k; proxy_busy_buffers_size 64k; proxy_temp_file_write_size 64k; fastcgi_buffers 256 4k; fastcgi_read_timeout 5m; gzip on; gzip_min_length 10240; gzip_proxied expired no-cache no-store private auth; gzip_types text/plain text/css text/xml text/javascript application/x-javascript application/xml; include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf; include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*; }

12. Now we need to set up our MusicBrainz caching proxy in NginX.
Put the following into /etc/nginx/sites-available/001-musicbrainz.
server { listen 0.0.0.0:5000; server_name myserver.com; access_log /var/log/nginx/001-musicbrainz.access.log; error_log /var/log/nginx/001-musicbrainz.error.log info; location /static/ { root /opt/musicbrainz/root; expires 24h; } location ~* ^/static/.*\.js$ { root /opt/musicbrainz/root; expires max; charset utf-8; } location = /favicon.ico { root /opt/musicbrainz/root; expires 7d; } location = /robots.txt { root /opt/musicbrainz/root; default_type text/plain; try_files $uri $uri.staging expires 1h; } location / { set $script ""; set $path_info $uri; fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:55901; fastcgi_param HTTPS $http_x_mb_https; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_NAME $script; fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $path_info; fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $query_string; fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD $request_method; fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE $content_type; fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH $content_length; fastcgi_param REQUEST_URI $request_uri; fastcgi_param SERVER_PROTOCOL $server_protocol; fastcgi_param REMOTE_ADDR $remote_addr; fastcgi_param REMOTE_PORT $remote_port; fastcgi_param SERVER_ADDR $server_addr; fastcgi_param SERVER_PORT $server_port; fastcgi_param SERVER_NAME $server_name; fastcgi_param REMOTE_ADDR $http_x_mb_remote_addr; fastcgi_param REMOTE_PORT $remote_port; fastcgi_param SERVER_ADDR $server_addr; fastcgi_param SERVER_PORT $server_port; fastcgi_param SERVER_NAME $server_name; } include /etc/nginx/mbserver-rewrites.conf; }
Don't forget to replace myserver.com with the domain name you're going to use.

13. Now to activate the MusicBrainz proxy and stop NginX taking over port 80
ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/001-musicbrainz /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ ln -s /opt/musicbrainz/admin/nginx/mbserver-rewrites.conf /etc/nginx/ rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

14. Now we need to keep the system safe and set up MusicBrainz to run as it's own user.
useradd musicbrainz -d /opt/musicbrainz chown -R musicbrainz /opt/musicbrainz

15. Now we create a file that logs all the MusicBrainz output and keeps everything hidden in the background. Add the following lines to /opt/musicbrainz/startmb.sh.
#!/bin/bash echo 'MusicBrainz Starting...' >/var/log/musicbrainz.log exec 2>&1 set -e cd /opt/musicbrainz umask 022 su musicbrainz -c "carton exec -- plackup -Ilib -s FCGI -E deployment --port 55901 --nproc 10 --pid fcgi.pid --keep-stderr=1 >/var/log/musicbrainz.log 2>&1" &

16. Now we need to make sure we can actually run it.
chmod +x /opt/musicbrainz/startmb.sh

17. We need to create this log file so MusicBrainz can write to it.
touch /var/log/musicbrainz.log chown musicbrainz /var/log/musicbrainz.log

18. Finally we start the MusicBrainz software and bring NginX to life to speed things up.
service nginx restart /opt/musicbrainz/startmb.sh

19. Optionally you can also have MusicBrainz start automatically with your server by adding the line...
/opt/musicbrainz/startmb.sh
... into /etc/rc.local before the exit 0 line.

20. To keep Musicbrainz up to date, you need to have the server run the replication packet updates. To do this, simply stick the slave update script into your crontab and set it to run once every hour. The cron line should look something like this:
0 * * * * /opt/musicbrainz/admin/cron/slave.sh

And that's it. You can now test if it's working by going to your domain name followed by :5000 in your web browser, for example http://myserver.com:5000 and you'll see a page that looks something like this.



If you see an NginX Gateway Error message then that means NginX is running but MusicBrainz isn't so make sure you've run the MusicBrainz script to start up that side of the service.

If you get an error that a Perl module is missing even though it is installed and it's listed in the cpanfile, you can force install it with the command...
cpanm -Llocal --notest 'Packagename'
So for example to install MooseX::Types you would use...
cpanm -Llocal --notest 'MooseX::Types'
This is because canton, when looking if something is installed, checks your entire system - but when Musicbrainz runs it will only use locally installed modules.