Server requirements¶
Anton is a Laravel 12 application.
Foundation¶
| Component | Requirement |
|---|---|
| PHP | 8.3 or newer |
| MySQL | 8.0.35 or newer |
| Apache | 2.4 with mod_rewrite and .htaccess, operated with PHP-FPM |
| Operating system | Ubuntu LTS1 — 24.04 with Anton as a Service |
| Supervisor | for background processing — not optional |
| Composer, Git, SSH | for installation and updates |
| Email dispatch | sendmail, for example |
MariaDB
MySQL is the default. MariaDB 10.11+ can be configured as an alternative for self-hosting. The two handle the axis order of geocoordinates differently; Anton detects the database at startup and adjusts accordingly.
Without Supervisor, Anton stands still
Uploads, conversions, import and export run as background jobs. If the supervisor is not running, everything piles up in the queue without any error message appearing. The Supervisor tab in Anton Doctor shows the state.
PHP extensions¶
- OpenSSL
- PDO with MySQL driver (
pdo_mysql) - Imagick
- Mbstring
- Tokenizer
- XML and DOM
- Ctype
- JSON
- Zip
- GD
- cURL
- Fileinfo
- Exif
- Intl
Imagick means the extension, not just the program
Anton processes images via the PHP extension Imagick, not by calling
ImageMagick on the command line. If php-imagick is missing, the
installation completes and the image conversions only fail later in the
background — without a visible error message.
Programs¶
Anton calls external programs. If one is missing, the corresponding processing steps fail — usually silently. The Binaries tab in Anton Doctor checks whether they are all present.
| Program | Purpose |
|---|---|
ImageMagick (convert, identify) |
Image conversions and preview images |
Ghostscript (gs) |
PDF access copies |
poppler-utils (pdftotext, pdftoppm) |
PDF full text and page previews |
| ffmpeg | Video and audio conversions, technical metadata |
| Tesseract | Text recognition (OCR) |
| OCRmyPDF | OCR text layer in PDFs |
| qpdf | PDF processing |
| img2pdf | Combining images into a PDF |
mysql, mysqldump |
Backups and restoration |
unzip |
Unpacking SIP packages and imports |
awk, du, git |
Operating and diagnostic tools |
Optional¶
This software is not a prerequisite for operation. Without it, a particular function is missing in each case — Anton keeps running.
| Software | Without it, this is missing |
|---|---|
Siegfried (sf) |
Format identification via PRONOM — and thus the risk assessment in preservation planning. Without Siegfried, the PRONOM ID remains empty. |
| Fido | Alternative for format identification; Anton uses whatever is present |
| Typesense | The instant search and gallery V2. The classic full-text search and gallery work without it. |
Siegfried comes from its own package repository
Siegfried is not in the Ubuntu sources. It is installed via the repository of itforarchivists.com.
-
Other Linux or Unix systems should work equally well. What matters is that PHP 8.3 and the programs listed above are available. ↩