Seafile 8 + Debian 11

Seafile Server
1

Hello,

for policy/security reasons I had to upgrade my server to the latest stable Debian version available, which now means Debian 11. Unfortunately my old Seafile server v6 does not seem to like it and does not start any more; given that an upgrade from Seafile 6 to 8 would be a nightmare in itself, I tried to do a fresh install of seafile-server 8.0.7 (CE), but unfortunately (while seafile.sh works) seahub.sh, after successfully completing all the mysql database configuration and the admin account creation, still fails to start.

What is worse, there is no error message at all in the logs directory, so I have no idea of what’s going wrong. There is just one new line in seafile.log saying “start to serve on pipe client”, then seahub.sh fails with “Error:Seahub failed to start. Please try to run “./seahub.sh start” again”.

What can I do to make it work? I understand that Debian 11 is not officially supported yet, but it is now the recommended version for new Debian installations, so I am sure that very soon there will be more and more users with my same problem. I am happy to do tests and help - is there a debug mode? Perhaps it’s just something stupid, like a missing or broken dependency.

Thank you,

2

Try to start seahub using

./seahub.sh start-fastcgi

Fastcgi is not supported any more, but it provides a bit more debug info.

Additionally, add to seahub_settings.py

DEBUG=True

to get a more verbose seahub.log.

Good luck.

3

Hi, you need to have Python 3.7.11 installed to work properly on Debian 11. By default, this system has version 3.9 installed. I have uninstalled Python 3.9 and installed 3.7. Don’t forget to install the required Python packages from the manual: https://manual.seafile.com/deploy/using_mysql/

5

In the community edition, seahub did not start on version 3.9 of Python, only the installation of version 3.7 helped

6

Thanks - actually the start-fastcgi put me on the right track, by showing a meaningful Python trace. It was quite a stupid issue: I thought I had successfully installed all the python modules but for some reason the captcha one was missing. So I just had to do “apt install python3-django-captcha” and everything started up fine.

I will however note that there is another thread in this forum saying “Seafile 8 does not support Debian 11” and that is quite misleading! I started with the assumption that there were serious problems and that misled me since the start.

2 Likes
7

Glad to hear that you fixed your problem.

If you’re talking about my other post, the exact wording is: “Debian 11 is not yet officially supported.” And this is correct as you can see here.

8

Reading “Debian 11 support will be added in Seafile 9.0” made me think that there was serious development to do (e.g. refactoring the code to work with newer versions of Python) so that real hacks would be needed to make Seafile 8 work. Actually, a comment above also suggests that Seafile 8 doesn’t work with Python 3.9, which, as I now discovered, is not true. But I don’t blame anyone - Seafile’s weak point (in an otherwise great piece of software that I have been using with full satisfaction for almost ten years now) has always been installation, debugging and documentation.

1 Like