4 The following software packages are *required* for this software to
7 - PHP 5.4+ For newer versions, some functions that are used may be
8 disabled by default, such as the pcntl_* family. See the
9 section on 'Queues and daemons' for more information.
10 - MariaDB 5+ GNU Social uses, by default, a MariaDB server for data
11 storage. Versions 5.x and 10.x have both reportedly
12 worked well. It is also possible to run MySQL 5.x.
13 - Web server Apache, lighttpd and nginx will all work. CGI mode is
14 recommended and also some variant of 'suexec' (or a
15 proper setup php-fpm pool)
16 NOTE: mod_rewrite or its equivalent is extremely useful.
18 Your PHP installation must include the following PHP extensions for a
19 functional setup of GNU Social:
21 - openssl (compiled in for Debian, enabled manually in Arch Linux)
22 - php5-curl Fetching files by HTTP.
23 - php5-gd Image manipulation (scaling).
24 - php5-gmp For Salmon signatures (part of OStatus).
25 - php5-json For WebFinger lookups and more.
26 - php5-mysqlnd The native driver for PHP5 MariaDB connections. If you
27 use MySQL, 'mysql' or 'mysqli' may work.
29 The above package names are for Debian based systems. In the case of
30 Arch Linux, PHP is compiled with support for most extensions but they
31 require manual enabling in the relevant php.ini file (mostly php5-gmp).
36 For some functionality, you will also need the following extensions:
38 - memcache A client for the memcached server, which caches database
39 information in volatile memory. This is important for
40 adequate performance on high-traffic sites. You will
41 also need a memcached server to store the data in.
42 - mailparse Efficient parsing of email requires this extension.
43 Submission by email or SMS-over-email uses this.
44 - sphinx A client for the sphinx server, an alternative to MySQL
45 or Postgresql fulltext search. You will also need a
46 Sphinx server to serve the search queries.
47 - gettext For multiple languages. Default on many PHP installs;
48 will be emulated if not present.
49 - exif For thumbnails to be properly oriented.
51 You may also experience better performance from your site if you install
52 a PHP bytecode cache/accelerator. Currently the recommended cache module
53 is 'xcache', which after installation (php5-xcache) can be enabled in
54 your site's config.php with:
61 A number of external PHP libraries are used to provide basic
62 functionality and optional functionality for your system. For your
63 convenience, they are available in the "extlib" directory of this
64 package, and you do not have to download and install them. However,
65 you may want to keep them up-to-date with the latest upstream version,
66 and the URLs are listed here for your convenience.
68 - DB_DataObject http://pear.php.net/package/DB_DataObject
69 - Validate http://pear.php.net/package/Validate
70 - OpenID by Janrain, http://janrain.com/openid-enabled/
71 - PEAR DB. Although this is an older data access system (new
72 packages should use PDO), the OpenID libraries depend on PEAR DB
74 - OAuth.php from http://oauth.googlecode.com/svn/code/php/
75 - markdown.php from http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/
76 - PEAR Mail, for sending out mail notifications
77 http://pear.php.net/package/Mail
78 - PEAR Net_SMTP, if you use the SMTP factory for notifications
79 http://pear.php.net/package/Net_SMTP
80 - PEAR Net_Socket, if you use the SMTP factory for notifications
81 http://pear.php.net/package/Net_Socket
82 - XMPPHP, the follow-up to Class.Jabber.php. Probably the best XMPP
83 library available for PHP. http://xmpphp.googlecode.com/. Note that
84 as of this writing the version of this library that is available in
85 the extlib directory is *significantly different* from the upstream
86 version (patches have been submitted). Upgrading to the upstream
87 version may render your StatusNet site unable to send or receive XMPP
89 - Facebook library. Used for the Facebook application.
90 - PEAR Validate is used for URL and email validation.
91 - Console_GetOpt for parsing command-line options.
92 predecessor to OStatus.
93 - HTTP_Request2, a library for making HTTP requests.
94 - PEAR Net_URL2 is an HTTP_Request2 dependency.
96 A design goal of GNU Social is that the basic Web functionality should
97 work on even the most restrictive commercial hosting services.
98 However, additional functionality, such as receiving messages by XMPP,
99 require that you be able to run long-running processes on your account.
100 In addition, posting by email require that you be able to install a mail
101 filter in your mail server.
106 Installing the basic GNU Social web component is relatively easy,
107 especially if you've previously installed PHP/MariaDB packages.
109 1. Unpack the tarball you downloaded on your Web server. Usually a
110 command like this will work:
112 tar zxf gnusocial-*.tar.gz
114 ...which will make a gnusocial-x.y.z subdirectory in your current
115 directory. (If you don't have shell access on your Web server, you
116 may have to unpack the tarball on your local computer and FTP the
117 files to the server.)
119 2. Move the tarball to a directory of your choosing in your Web root
120 directory. Usually something like this will work:
122 mv gnusocial-x.y.z /var/www/gnusocial
124 This will often make your GNU Social instance available in the gnusocial
125 path of your server, like "http://example.net/gnusocial". "social" or
126 "blog" might also be good path names. If you know how to configure
127 virtual hosts on your web server, you can try setting up
128 "http://social.example.net/" or the like.
130 If you have "rewrite" support on your webserver, and you should,
131 then please enable this in order to make full use of your site. This
132 will enable "Fancy URL" support, which you can read more about if you
133 scroll down a bit in this document.
135 3. Make your target directory writeable by the Web server.
137 chmod a+w /var/www/gnusocial/
139 On some systems, this will probably work:
141 chgrp www-data /var/www/gnusocial/
142 chmod g+w /var/www/gnusocial/
144 If your Web server runs as another user besides "www-data", try
145 that user's default group instead. As a last resort, you can create
146 a new group like "gnusocial" and add the Web server's user to the group.
148 4. You should also take this moment to make your avatar, background, and
149 file subdirectories writeable by the Web server. An insecure way to do
152 chmod a+w /var/www/gnusocial/avatar
153 chmod a+w /var/www/gnusocial/background
154 chmod a+w /var/www/gnusocial/file
156 You can also make the avatar, background, and file directories
157 writeable by the Web server group, as noted above.
159 5. Create a database to hold your site data. Something like this
162 mysqladmin -u "root" --password="rootpassword" create gnusocial
164 Note that GNU Social should have its own database; you should not share
165 the database with another program. You can name it whatever you want,
168 (If you don't have shell access to your server, you may need to use
169 a tool like phpMyAdmin to create a database. Check your hosting
170 service's documentation for how to create a new MariaDB database.)
172 6. Create a new database account that GNU Social will use to access the
173 database. If you have shell access, this will probably work from the
176 GRANT ALL on gnusocial.*
177 TO 'gnusocial'@'localhost'
178 IDENTIFIED BY 'agoodpassword';
180 You should change the user identifier 'gnusocial' and 'agoodpassword'
181 to your preferred new database username and password. You may want to
182 test logging in to MariaDB as this new user.
184 7. In a browser, navigate to the GNU Social install script; something like:
186 http://social.example.net/install.php
188 Enter the database connection information and your site name. The
189 install program will configure your site and install the initial,
190 almost-empty database.
192 8. You should now be able to navigate to your social site's main directory
193 and see the "Public Timeline", which will probably be empty. You can
194 now register new user, post some notices, edit your profile, etc.
199 By default, GNU Social will use URLs that include the main PHP program's
200 name in them. For example, a user's home profile might be found at:
202 http://example.net/gnusocial/index.php/gnusocial/fred
204 On certain systems that don't support this kind of syntax, they'll
207 http://example.net/gnusocial/index.php?p=gnusocial/fred
209 It's possible to configure the software so it looks like this instead:
211 http://example.net/gnusocial/fred
213 These "fancy URLs" are more readable and memorable for users. To use
214 fancy URLs, you must either have Apache 2.x with .htaccess enabled and
215 mod_rewrite enabled, -OR- know how to configure "url redirection" in
216 your server (like lighttpd or nginx).
218 1. Copy the htaccess.sample file to .htaccess in your StatusNet
221 2. Change the "RewriteBase" in the new .htaccess file to be the URL path
222 to your GNU Social installation on your server. Typically this will
223 be the path to your GNU Social directory relative to your Web root.
224 If you are installing it in the root directory, leave it as '/'.
226 3. Add, uncomment or change a line in your config.php file so it says:
228 $config['site']['fancy'] = true;
230 You should now be able to navigate to a "fancy" URL on your server,
233 http://example.net/gnusocial/main/register
235 If you changed your HTTP server configuration, you may need to restart
238 If it doesn't work, double-check that AllowOverride for the GNU Social
239 directory is 'All' in your Apache configuration file. This is usually
240 /etc/httpd.conf, /etc/apache/httpd.conf, or (on Debian and Ubuntu)
241 /etc/apache2/sites-available/default. See the Apache documentation for
242 .htaccess files for more details:
244 http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/howto/htaccess.html
246 Also, check that mod_rewrite is installed and enabled:
248 http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_rewrite.html
253 To use a Sphinx server to search users and notices, you'll need to
254 enable the SphinxSearch plugin. Add to your config.php:
256 addPlugin('SphinxSearch');
257 $config['sphinx']['server'] = 'searchhost.local';
259 You also need to install, compile and enable the sphinx pecl extension for
260 php on the client side, which itself depends on the sphinx development files.
262 See plugins/SphinxSearch/README for more details and server setup.
267 StatusNet supports a cheap-and-dirty system for sending update messages
268 to mobile phones and for receiving updates from the mobile. Instead of
269 sending through the SMS network itself, which is costly and requires
270 buy-in from the wireless carriers, it simply piggybacks on the email
271 gateways that many carriers provide to their customers. So, SMS
272 configuration is essentially email configuration.
274 Each user sends to a made-up email address, which they keep a secret.
275 Incoming email that is "From" the user's SMS email address, and "To"
276 the users' secret email address on the site's domain, will be
277 converted to a notice and stored in the DB.
279 For this to work, there *must* be a domain or sub-domain for which all
280 (or most) incoming email can pass through the incoming mail filter.
282 1. Run the SQL script carrier.sql in your StatusNet database. This will
285 mysql -u "statusnetuser" --password="statusnetpassword" statusnet < db/carrier.sql
287 This will populate your database with a list of wireless carriers
288 that support email SMS gateways.
290 2. Make sure the maildaemon.php file is executable:
292 chmod +x scripts/maildaemon.php
294 Note that "daemon" is kind of a misnomer here; the script is more
295 of a filter than a daemon.
297 2. Edit /etc/aliases on your mail server and add the following line:
299 *: /path/to/statusnet/scripts/maildaemon.php
301 3. Run whatever code you need to to update your aliases database. For
302 many mail servers (Postfix, Exim, Sendmail), this should work:
306 You may need to restart your mail server for the new database to
309 4. Set the following in your config.php file:
311 $config['mail']['domain'] = 'yourdomain.example.net';
313 At this point, post-by-email and post-by-SMS-gateway should work. Note
314 that if your mail server is on a different computer from your email
315 server, you'll need to have a full installation of StatusNet, a working
316 config.php, and access to the StatusNet database from the mail server.
322 Some activities that StatusNet needs to do, like broadcast OStatus, SMS,
323 XMPP messages and TwitterBridge operations, can be 'queued' and done by
324 off-line bots instead.
326 Two mechanisms are available to achieve offline operations:
328 * New embedded OpportunisticQM plugin, which is enabled by default
329 * Legacy queuedaemon script, which can be enabled via config file.
331 ### OpportunisticQM plugin
333 This plugin is enabled by default. It tries its best to do background
334 job during regular HTTP requests, like API or HTML pages calls.
336 Since queueing system is enabled by default, notices to be broadcasted
337 will be stored, by default, into DB (table queue_item).
339 Each time it can, OpportunisticQM will try to handle some of them.
341 This is a good solution whether you:
343 * have no access to command line (shared hosting)
344 * do not want to deal with long-running PHP processes
345 * run a low traffic GNU social instance
347 In other case, you really should consider enabling the queuedaemon for
348 performance reasons. Background daemons are necessary anyway if you wish
349 to use the Instant Messaging features such as communicating via XMPP.
353 If you want to use legacy queuedaemon, you must be able to run
354 long-running offline processes, either on your main Web server or on
355 another server you control. (Your other server will still need all the
356 above prerequisites, with the exception of Apache.) Installing on a
357 separate server is probably a good idea for high-volume sites.
359 1. You'll need the "CLI" (command-line interface) version of PHP
360 installed on whatever server you use.
362 Modern PHP versions in some operating systems have disabled functions
363 related to forking, which is required for daemons to operate. To make
364 this work, make sure that your php-cli config (/etc/php5/cli/php.ini)
365 does NOT have these functions listed under 'disable_functions':
367 * pcntl_fork, pcntl_wait, pcntl_wifexited, pcntl_wexitstatus,
368 pcntl_wifsignaled, pcntl_wtermsig
370 Other recommended settings for optimal performance are:
371 * mysqli.allow_persistent = On
372 * mysqli.reconnect = On
374 2. If you're using a separate server for queues, install StatusNet
375 somewhere on the server. You don't need to worry about the
376 .htaccess file, but make sure that your config.php file is close
377 to, or identical to, your Web server's version.
379 3. In your config.php files (both the Web server and the queues
380 server!), set the following variable:
382 $config['queue']['enabled'] = true;
383 $config['queue']['daemon'] = true;
385 You may also want to look at the 'daemon' section of this file for
386 more daemon options. Note that if you set the 'user' and/or 'group'
387 options, you'll need to create that user and/or group by hand.
388 They're not created automatically.
390 4. On the queues server, run the command scripts/startdaemons.sh.
392 This will run the queue handlers:
394 * queuedaemon.php - polls for queued items for inbox processing and
395 pushing out to OStatus, SMS, XMPP, etc.
396 * imdaemon.php - if an IM plugin is enabled (like XMPP)
397 * other daemons, like TwitterBridge ones, that you may have enabled
399 These daemons will automatically restart in most cases of failure
400 including memory leaks (if a memory_limit is set), but may still die
401 or behave oddly if they lose connections to the XMPP or queue servers.
403 It may be a good idea to use a daemon-monitoring service, like 'monit',
404 to check their status and keep them running.
406 All the daemons write their process IDs (pids) to /var/run/ by
407 default. This can be useful for starting, stopping, and monitoring the
408 daemons. If you are running multiple sites on the same machine, it will
409 be necessary to avoid collisions of these PID files by setting a site-
410 specific directory in config.php:
412 $config['daemon']['piddir'] = __DIR__ . '/../run/';
414 It is also possible to use a STOMP server instead of our kind of hacky
415 home-grown DB-based queue solution. This is strongly recommended for
416 best response time, especially when using XMPP.
421 Older themes (version 0.9.x and below) no longer work with StatusNet
422 1.0.x, due to major changes in the site layout. We ship with three new
423 themes for this version, 'neo', 'neo-blue' and 'neo-light'.
425 As of right now, your ability to change the theme is site-wide; users
426 can't choose their own theme. Additionally, the only thing you can
427 change in the theme is CSS stylesheets and some image files; you can't
428 change the HTML output, like adding or removing menu items.
430 You can choose a theme using the $config['site']['theme'] element in
431 the config.php file. See below for details.
433 You can add your own theme by making a sub-directory of the 'theme'
434 subdirectory with the name of your theme. Each theme can have the
437 display.css: a CSS2 file for "default" styling for all browsers.
438 logo.png: a logo image for the site.
439 default-avatar-profile.png: a 96x96 pixel image to use as the avatar for
440 users who don't upload their own.
441 default-avatar-stream.png: Ditto, but 48x48. For streams of notices.
442 default-avatar-mini.png: Ditto ditto, but 24x24. For subscriptions
443 listing on profile pages.
445 You may want to start by copying the files from the default theme to
451 Translations in StatusNet use the gettext system <http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/>.
452 Theoretically, you can add your own sub-directory to the locale/
453 subdirectory to add a new language to your system. You'll need to
454 compile the ".po" files into ".mo" files, however.
456 Contributions of translation information to StatusNet are very easy:
457 you can use the Web interface at translatewiki.net to add one
458 or a few or lots of new translations -- or even new languages. You can
459 also download more up-to-date .po files there, if you so desire.
461 For info on helping with translations, see http://status.net/wiki/Translations
466 There is no built-in system for doing backups in StatusNet. You can make
467 backups of a working StatusNet system by backing up the database and
468 the Web directory. To backup the database use mysqldump <http://ur1.ca/7xo>
469 and to backup the Web directory, try tar.
474 The administrator can set the "private" flag for a site so that it's
475 not visible to non-logged-in users. (This is the default for new installs of version 1.0!)
477 This might be useful for workgroups who want to share a social
478 networking site for project management, but host it on a public
481 Total privacy is attempted but not guaranteed or ensured. Private sites
482 currently don't work well with OStatus federation.
484 Access to file attachments can also be restricted to logged-in users only.
486 1. Add a directory outside the web root where your file uploads will be
487 stored. Usually a command like this will work:
489 mkdir /var/www/statusnet-files
491 2. Make the file uploads directory writeable by the web server. An
492 insecure way to do this is:
494 chmod a+x /var/www/statusnet-files
496 3. Tell StatusNet to use this directory for file uploads. Add a line
497 like this to your config.php:
499 $config['attachments']['dir'] = '/var/www/statusnet-files';