nginx module problem on Webmin 2.000 on Fedora 36

[fbachofner]

I have recently converted a server from Ubuntu 20.04 to Fedora 36

Webmin 2.000 is installed and generally working well (with Authentic theme version 20.01.1 ). To this I added the 0.11 nginx module available at https://www.justindhoffman.com/sites/justindhoffman.com/files/nginx-0.11.wbm_.gz

Launching the nginx module from within Webmin I get a 500 error:

 500 -
Can't locate HTML/Entities.pm in @INC (you may need to install the HTML::Entities module) (@INC contains: /usr/libexec/webmin /usr/local/lib64/perl5/5.34 /usr/local/share/perl5/5.34 /usr/lib64/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/lib64/perl5 /usr/share/perl5 /usr/libexec/webmin/ .) at /usr/libexec/webmin/nginx/index.cgi line 5. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/libexec/webmin/nginx/index.cgi line 5. 

I am not sure how to fix this. My search-fu is apparently weak and does not come up with anything which seems on point, except for this Russian language page:
https://amkolomna.ru/content/cant-locate-htmlentitiespm-inc

Any and all help would be greatly appreciated. It's a bit of a pain in the rear to have to use the command line to make links to add sites to "sites-enabled"

[fbachofner]

I should add:

I did find:

1. https://pkgs.org/download/perl(HTML::Entities)
2. https://fedora.pkgs.org/36/fedora-aarch64/perl-HTML-Entities-Interpolate-1.10-17.fc36.noarch.rpm.html

from this I inferred:
sudo dnf install perl-HTML-Parser perl-HTML-Entities-Interpolate

So, I:

1. removed the nginx module
2. installed the perl packages listed above
3. rebooted the server (rather than figuring out how to restart perl (thinking that might be necessary)
4. reinstalled the nginx Webmin module

STILL have the problem!

Meanwhile, in the "perl modules" interface in Webmin, it shows I have no perl modules.

Does this HTML/Entities.pm need to be installed into Webmin? If so how? Or is this needed at the system level as I have attempted?

Thanks for any help! :-)

[Ilia]

Hello,

We do not support that Nginx module. We highly recommend for the smoothest Nginx experience to use Virtualmin (Webmin module for hosting management that we actively support) with official install script and LEMP stack.

It can be installed as easy as sh install.sh -b LEMP.

For Fedora 36 you would need to use pre-release version of install script with extra sh install-7-pre-release.sh -e -b LEMP switch.

https://www.virtualmin.com/os-support/

[fbachofner]

I @iliajie

Thanks for your quick response and sorry I did not reply 20 days ago, I had a lot on my plate!

We do not support that Nginx module. We highly recommend for the smoothest Nginx experience to use Virtualmin

The bit of hosting I do is "fully managed," clients are not allowed to "touch" the server in any way, so I am not interested in extra "weight" on the server like Virtualmin.

At the same time, the prepackaged LEMP stack you suggested probably makes it harder to keep multiple versions of PHP running (I need two: 7.4 and 8.1) and won't really allow me to learn as much about the interactions among the various pieces of my stack.

Anyway, I figured that Webmin ran fine before (on my Ubuntu server) so I should be able to solve it on Fedora.

I reread the full Webmin install instructions including the comment:

install optional dependencies with :
yum -y install perl perl-Net-SSLeay openssl perl-IO-Tty perl-Encode-Detect

I installed these dependencies with dnf instead of yum, and I am happy to report that the unsupported nginix module works fine!

For giggles, I also dnf removed perl-HTML-Parser perl-HTML-Entities-Interpolate see my comment above

This removal action again broke the nginx module!

From it, I figured out it seems only perl-HTML-Entities-Interpolate is required to get it to work again, but other aspects of Webmin might now fail. Time shall tell and I will report back if so.

I certainly appreciate that you, Jamie, et al can't support this third party module (indeed, even the author, Justin Hoffman, seems to have abandoned it), but while it works, it seems to be a significantly lighter solution to managing nginx sites (i.e. virtual hosts) than a full install of Virtualmin.

It would be awesome if you could incorporate the module into the Webmin core for those who do not want to run Virtualmin (just as a module exists for Apache).

Thanks for your consideration and all you have done for Webmin! :-)