5 Laconica 0.7.2 ("Talk about the Passion")
8 This is the README file for Laconica, the Open Source microblogging
9 platform. It includes installation instructions, descriptions of
10 options you can set, warnings, tips, and general info for
11 administrators. Information on using Laconica can be found in the
12 "doc" subdirectory or in the "help" section on-line.
17 Laconica (pronounced "luh-KAWN-ih-kuh") is a Free and Open Source
18 microblogging platform. It helps people in a community, company or
19 group to exchange short (140 character) messages over the Web. Users
20 can choose which people to "follow" and receive only their friends' or
21 colleagues' status messages. It provides a similar service to sites
22 like Twitter, Jaiku and Plurk.
24 With a little work, status messages can be sent to mobile phones,
25 instant messenger programs (GTalk/Jabber), and specially-designed
26 desktop clients that support the Twitter API.
28 Laconica supports an open standard called OpenMicroBlogging
29 <http://openmicroblogging.org/> that lets users on different Web sites
30 or in different companies subscribe to each others' notices. It
31 enables a distributed social network spread all across the Web.
33 Laconica was originally developed for the Open Software Service,
34 Identi.ca <http://identi.ca/>. It is shared with you in hope that you
35 too make an Open Software Service available to your users. To learn
36 more, please see the Open Software Service Definition 1.1:
38 http://www.opendefinition.org/ossd
43 This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
44 it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as
45 published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the
46 License, or (at your option) any later version.
48 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
49 WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
50 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
51 Affero General Public License for more details.
53 You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public
54 License along with this program, in the file "COPYING". If not, see
55 <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
57 IMPORTANT NOTE: The GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) has
58 *different requirements* from the "regular" GPL. In particular, if
59 you make modifications to the Laconica source code on your server,
60 you *MUST MAKE AVAILABLE* the modified version of the source code
61 to your users under the same license. This is a legal requirement
62 of using the software, and if you do not wish to share your
63 modifications, *YOU MAY NOT INSTALL LACONICA*.
65 Additional library software has been made available in the 'extlib'
66 directory. All of it is Free Software and can be distributed under
67 liberal terms, but those terms may differ in detail from the AGPL's
68 particulars. See each package's license file in the extlib directory
74 This is a minor bug-fix and feature release since version 0.7.1,
75 released Feb 9 2009. Notable changes this version:
77 - First version of a web-based installer
78 - Use Net_URL_Mapper instead of mod_rewrite to map "fancy URLs",
79 for a much simpler installation and use of PATH_INFO on sites
80 that don't have mod_rewrite.
81 - A plugin framework for system events, to make it easier to build
83 - A plugin for Google Analytics
84 - A plugin to use blogspam.net to check notices for spam
85 - A plugin to send linkbacks for notices about blog posts
86 - Configurable check for duplicate notices in a specific time
89 - First implementation of Twitter Search API
90 - Add streamlined mobile device-friendly styles when enabled in config.
91 - A queue server for sending notices to Twitter
92 - A queue server for sending notices to Facebook
93 - A queue server for sending notices to a ping server
94 - Fixed a bug in nonces for OAuth in OpenMicroBlogging
95 - Fixed bugs in transfer of avatars in OpenMicroBlogging
96 - @-links go to permalinks for local users
97 - Better handling of DB errors (instead of dreaded DB_DataObject blank
99 - Initial version of an RPM spec file
100 - More consistent display of notices in notice search
101 - A stylesheet for printed output
102 - "Social graph" methods for Twitter API
103 - Documentation for the JavaScript badge
104 - Debugged a ton of problems that happened with E_NOTICE on
105 - Better caching in RSS feeds
106 - Optionally send email when an @-message is received
107 - Automatically add tags for every group message
108 - Add framebusting JavaScript to help avoid clickjacking attacks.
109 - Optionally ignore some notice sources for public page.
110 - Add default SMS carriers and notice sources to distribution file.
111 - Change titles to use mixed case instead of all uppercase.
112 - Use exceptions for error handling.
114 Changes in version 0.7.1:
116 - Vast improvement in auto-linking to URLs.
117 - Link to group search from user's group page
118 - Improved interface in Facebook application
119 - Fix bad redirects in delete notice
120 - Updated PostgreSQL database creation script
121 - Show filesize in avatar/logo upload
122 - Vastly improved avatar/logo upload
123 - Allow re-authentication with OpenID
124 - Correctly link hashtabs inside parens and brackets
125 - Group and avatar image transparency works
126 - Better handling of commands through the Web and Ajax channels
127 - Fix links for profile page feeds
128 - Fixed destroy method in API
129 - Fix endpoint of Connect menu when XMPP disabled
130 - Show number of group members
131 - Enable configuration files in /etc/laconica/
133 Changes in version 0.7.0:
135 - Support for groups. Users can join groups and send themed notices
136 to those groups. All other members of the group receive the notices.
137 - Laconica-specific extensions to the Twitter API.
138 - A Facebook application.
139 - A massive UI redesign. The HTML generated by Laconica has changed
140 significantly, to make theming easier and to give a more open look
141 by default. Also, sidebar.
142 - Massive code hygiene changes to move towards compliance with the PEAR
143 coding standards and to support the new UI redesign.
144 - Began the breakup of util.php -- moved about 30% of code to a views
146 - UI elements for statistical information (like top posters or most
147 popular groups) added in a sidebar.
148 - include Javascript badge by Kent Brewster.
149 - Updated online documentation.
150 - Cropping of user avatars using Jcrop.
151 - fix for Twitter bridge to not send "Expect:" headers.
152 - add 'dm' as a synonym for 'd' in commands.
153 - Upgrade upstream version of jQuery to 1.3.
154 - Upgrade upstream version of PHP-OpenID to 2.1.2.
155 - Move OpenMicroBlogging specification to its own repository.
156 - Make tag-based RSS streams work.
157 - Additional locales: Bulgarian, Catalan, Greek, Hebrew, simplified
158 Chinese, Telugu, Taiwanese Chinese, Vietnamese,
159 - PostgreSQL updates.
160 - Nasty bug in Twitter bridge that wouldn't verify with Twitter
165 The following software packages are *required* for this software to
168 - PHP 5.2.x. It may be possible to run this software on earlier
169 versions of PHP, but many of the functions used are only available
171 - MySQL 5.x. The Laconica database is stored, by default, in a MySQL
172 server. It has been primarily tested on 5.x servers, although it may
173 be possible to install on earlier (or later!) versions. The server
174 *must* support the MyISAM storage engine -- the default for most
175 MySQL servers -- *and* the InnoDB storage engine.
176 - A Web server. Preferably, you should have Apache 2.2.x with the
177 mod_rewrite extension installed and enabled.
179 Your PHP installation must include the following PHP extensions:
181 - Curl. This is for fetching files by HTTP.
182 - XMLWriter. This is for formatting XML and HTML output.
183 - MySQL. For accessing the database.
184 - GD. For scaling down avatar images.
185 - mbstring. For handling Unicode (UTF-8) encoded strings.
186 - gettext. For multiple languages. Default on many PHP installs.
188 For some functionality, you will also need the following extensions:
190 - Memcache. A client for the memcached server, which caches database
191 information in volatile memory. This is important for adequate
192 performance on high-traffic sites. You will also need a memcached
193 server to store the data in.
194 - Mailparse. Efficient parsing of email requires this extension.
195 Submission by email or SMS-over-email uses this extension.
196 - Sphinx Search. A client for the sphinx server, an alternative
197 to MySQL or Postgresql fulltext search. You will also need a
198 Sphinx server to serve the search queries.
200 You will almost definitely get 2-3 times better performance from your
201 site if you install a PHP bytecode cache/accelerator. Some well-known
202 examples are: eaccelerator, Turck mmcache, xcache, apc. Zend Optimizer
203 is a proprietary accelerator installed on some hosting sites.
208 A number of external PHP libraries are used to provide basic
209 functionality and optional functionality for your system. For your
210 convenience, they are available in the "extlib" directory of this
211 package, and you do not have to download and install them. However,
212 you may want to keep them up-to-date with the latest upstream version,
213 and the URLs are listed here for your convenience.
215 - DB_DataObject http://pear.php.net/package/DB_DataObject
216 - Validate http://pear.php.net/package/Validate
217 - OpenID from OpenIDEnabled (not the PEAR version!). We decided
218 to use the openidenabled.com version since it's more widely
219 implemented, and seems to be better supported.
220 http://openidenabled.com/php-openid/
221 - PEAR DB. Although this is an older data access system (new
222 packages should probably use PHP DBO), the OpenID libraries
223 depend on PEAR DB so we use it here, too. DB_DataObject can
224 also use PEAR MDB2, which may give you better performance
225 but won't work with OpenID.
226 http://pear.php.net/package/DB
227 - OAuth.php from http://oauth.googlecode.com/svn/code/php/
228 - markdown.php from http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/
229 - PEAR Mail, for sending out mail notifications
230 http://pear.php.net/package/Mail
231 - PEAR Net_SMTP, if you use the SMTP factory for notifications
232 http://pear.php.net/package/Net_SMTP
233 - PEAR Net_Socket, if you use the SMTP factory for notifications
234 http://pear.php.net/package/Net_Socket
235 - XMPPHP, the follow-up to Class.Jabber.php. Probably the best XMPP
236 library available for PHP. http://xmpphp.googlecode.com/. Note that
237 as of this writing the version of this library that is available in
238 the extlib directory is *significantly different* from the upstream
239 version (patches have been submitted). Upgrading to the upstream
240 version may render your Laconica site unable to send or receive XMPP
242 - Facebook library. Used for the Facebook application.
244 A design goal of Laconica is that the basic Web functionality should
245 work on even the most restrictive commercial hosting services.
246 However, additional functionality, such as receiving messages by
247 Jabber/GTalk, require that you be able to run long-running processes
248 on your account. In addition, posting by email or from SMS require
249 that you be able to install a mail filter in your mail server.
254 Installing the basic Laconica Web component is relatively easy,
255 especially if you've previously installed PHP/MySQL packages.
257 1. Unpack the tarball you downloaded on your Web server. Usually a
258 command like this will work:
260 tar zxf laconica-0.7.1.tar.gz
262 ...which will make a laconica-0.7.1 subdirectory in your current
263 directory. (If you don't have shell access on your Web server, you
264 may have to unpack the tarball on your local computer and FTP the
265 files to the server.)
267 2. Move the tarball to a directory of your choosing in your Web root
268 directory. Usually something like this will work:
270 mv laconica-0.7.1 /var/www/mublog
272 This will make your Laconica instance available in the mublog path of
273 your server, like "http://example.net/mublog". "microblog" or
274 "laconica" might also be good path names. If you know how to
275 configure virtual hosts on your web server, you can try setting up
276 "http://micro.example.net/" or the like.
278 3. Make your target directory writeable by the Web server.
280 chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/
282 On some systems, this will probably work:
284 chgrp www-data /var/www/mublog/
285 chmod g+w /var/www/mublog/
287 If your Web server runs as another user besides "www-data", try
288 that user's default group instead. As a last resort, you can create
289 a new group like "mublog" and add the Web server's user to the group.
291 4. You should also take this moment to make your avatar subdirectory
292 writeable by the Web server. An insecure way to do this is:
294 chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/avatar
296 You can also make the avatar directory writeable by the Web server
297 group, as noted above.
299 5. Create a database to hold your microblog data. Something like this
302 mysqladmin -u "username" --password="password" create laconica
304 Note that Laconica must have its own database; you can't share the
305 database with another program. You can name it whatever you want,
308 (If you don't have shell access to your server, you may need to use
309 a tool like PHPAdmin to create a database. Check your hosting
310 service's documentation for how to create a new MySQL database.)
312 6. Create a new database account that Laconica will use to access the
313 database. If you have shell access, this will probably work from the
316 GRANT ALL on laconica.*
317 TO 'lacuser'@'localhost'
318 IDENTIFIED BY 'lacpassword';
320 You should change 'lacuser' and 'lacpassword' to your preferred new
321 username and password. You may want to test logging in to MySQL as
324 7. In a browser, navigate to the Laconica install script; something like:
326 http://yourserver.example.com/mublog/install.php
328 Enter the database connection information and your site name. The
329 install program will configure your site and install the initial,
330 almost-empty database.
332 8. You should now be able to navigate to your microblog's main directory
333 and see the "Public Timeline", which will be empty. If not, magic
334 has happened! You can now register a new user, post some notices,
335 edit your profile, etc. However, you may want to wait to do that stuff
336 if you think you can set up "fancy URLs" (see below), since some
337 URLs are stored in the database.
342 By default, Laconica will use URLs that include the main PHP program's
343 name in them. For example, a user's home profile might be
346 http://example.org/mublog/index.php/mublog/fred
348 On certain systems that don't support this kind of syntax, they'll
351 http://example.org/mublog/index.php?p=mublog/fred
353 It's possible to configure the software so it looks like this instead:
355 http://example.org/mublog/fred
357 These "fancy URLs" are more readable and memorable for users. To use
358 fancy URLs, you must either have Apache 2.x with .htaccess enabled and
359 mod_redirect enabled, -OR- know how to configure "url redirection" in
362 1. Copy the htaccess.sample file to .htaccess in your Laconica
363 directory. Note: if you have control of your server's httpd.conf or
364 similar configuration files, it can greatly improve performance to
365 import the .htaccess file into your conf file instead. If you're
366 not sure how to do it, you may save yourself a lot of headache by
367 just leaving the .htaccess file.
369 2. Change the "RewriteBase" in the new .htaccess file to be the URL path
370 to your Laconica installation on your server. Typically this will
371 be the path to your Laconica directory relative to your Web root.
373 3. Add or uncomment or change a line in your config.php file so it says:
375 $config['site']['fancy'] = true;
377 You should now be able to navigate to a "fancy" URL on your server,
380 http://example.net/mublog/main/register
382 If you changed your HTTP server configuration, you may need to restart
388 To use a Sphinx server to search users and notices, you also need
389 to install, compile and enable the sphinx pecl extension for php on the
390 client side, which itself depends on the sphinx development files.
391 "pecl install sphinx" should take care of that. Add "extension=sphinx.so"
392 to your php.ini and reload apache to enable it.
394 You can update your MySQL or Postgresql databases to drop their fulltext
395 search indexes, since they're now provided by sphinx.
397 On the sphinx server side, a script reads the main database and build
398 the keyword index. A cron job reads the database and keeps the sphinx
399 indexes up to date. scripts/sphinx-cron.sh should be called by cron
400 every 5 minutes, for example. scripts/sphinx.sh is an init.d script
401 to start and stop the sphinx search daemon.
406 Laconica supports a cheap-and-dirty system for sending update messages
407 to mobile phones and for receiving updates from the mobile. Instead of
408 sending through the SMS network itself, which is costly and requires
409 buy-in from the wireless carriers, it simply piggybacks on the email
410 gateways that many carriers provide to their customers. So, SMS
411 configuration is essentially email configuration.
413 Each user sends to a made-up email address, which they keep a secret.
414 Incoming email that is "From" the user's SMS email address, and "To"
415 the users' secret email address on the site's domain, will be
416 converted to a notice and stored in the DB.
418 For this to work, there *must* be a domain or sub-domain for which all
419 (or most) incoming email can pass through the incoming mail filter.
421 1. Run the SQL script carrier.sql in your Laconica database. This will
424 mysql -u "lacuser" --password="lacpassword" laconica < db/carrier.sql
426 This will populate your database with a list of wireless carriers
427 that support email SMS gateways.
429 2. Make sure the maildaemon.php file is executable:
431 chmod +x scripts/maildaemon.php
433 Note that "daemon" is kind of a misnomer here; the script is more
434 of a filter than a daemon.
436 2. Edit /etc/aliases on your mail server and add the following line:
438 *: /path/to/laconica/scripts/maildaemon.php
440 3. Run whatever code you need to to update your aliases database. For
441 many mail servers (Postfix, Exim, Sendmail), this should work:
445 You may need to restart your mail server for the new database to
448 4. Set the following in your config.php file:
450 $config['mail']['domain'] = 'yourdomain.example.net';
452 At this point, post-by-email and post-by-SMS-gateway should work. Note
453 that if your mail server is on a different computer from your email
454 server, you'll need to have a full installation of Laconica, a working
455 config.php, and access to the Laconica database from the mail server.
460 XMPP (eXtended Message and Presence Protocol, <http://xmpp.org/>) is the
461 instant-messenger protocol that drives Jabber and GTalk IM. You can
462 distribute messages via XMPP using the system below; however, you
463 need to run the XMPP incoming daemon to allow incoming messages as
466 1. You may want to strongly consider setting up your own XMPP server.
467 Ejabberd, OpenFire, and JabberD are all Open Source servers.
468 Jabber, Inc. provides a high-performance commercial server.
470 2. You must register a Jabber ID (JID) with your new server. It helps
471 to choose a name like "update@example.com" or "notice" or something
472 similar. Alternately, your "update JID" can be registered on a
473 publicly-available XMPP service, like jabber.org or GTalk.
475 Laconica will not register the JID with your chosen XMPP server;
476 you need to do this manually, with an XMPP client like Gajim,
477 Telepathy, or Pidgin.im.
479 3. Configure your site's XMPP variables, as described below in the
480 configuration section.
482 On a default installation, your site can broadcast messages using
483 XMPP. Users won't be able to post messages using XMPP unless you've
484 got the XMPP daemon running. See 'Queues and daemons' below for how
485 to set that up. Also, once you have a sizable number of users, sending
486 a lot of SMS, OMB, and XMPP messages whenever someone posts a message
487 can really slow down your site; it may cause posting to timeout.
489 NOTE: stream_select(), a crucial function for network programming, is
490 broken on PHP 5.2.x less than 5.2.6 on amd64-based servers. We don't
491 work around this bug in Laconica; current recommendation is to move
492 off of amd64 to another server.
497 You can send *all* messages from your microblogging site to a
498 third-party service using XMPP. This can be useful for providing
499 search, indexing, bridging, or other cool services.
501 To configure a downstream site to receive your public stream, add
502 their "JID" (Jabber ID) to your config.php as follows:
504 $config['xmpp']['public'][] = 'downstream@example.net';
506 (Don't miss those square brackets at the end.) Note that your XMPP
507 broadcasting must be configured as mentioned above. Although you can
508 send out messages at "Web time", high-volume sites should strongly
509 consider setting up queues and daemons.
514 Some activities that Laconica needs to do, like broadcast OMB, SMS,
515 and XMPP messages, can be 'queued' and done by off-line bots instead.
516 For this to work, you must be able to run long-running offline
517 processes, either on your main Web server or on another server you
518 control. (Your other server will still need all the above
519 prerequisites, with the exception of Apache.) Installing on a separate
520 server is probably a good idea for high-volume sites.
522 1. You'll need the "CLI" (command-line interface) version of PHP
523 installed on whatever server you use.
525 2. If you're using a separate server for queues, install Laconica
526 somewhere on the server. You don't need to worry about the
527 .htaccess file, but make sure that your config.php file is close
528 to, or identical to, your Web server's version.
530 3. In your config.php files (both the Web server and the queues
531 server!), set the following variable:
533 $config['queue']['enabled'] = true;
535 You may also want to look at the 'daemon' section of this file for
536 more daemon options. Note that if you set the 'user' and/or 'group'
537 options, you'll need to create that user and/or group by hand.
538 They're not created automatically.
540 4. On the queues server, run the command scripts/startdaemons.sh. It
541 needs as a parameter the install path; if you run it from the
542 Laconica dir, "." should suffice.
544 This will run eight (for now) queue handlers:
546 * xmppdaemon.php - listens for new XMPP messages from users and stores
547 them as notices in the database.
548 * jabberqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
549 registered users who should receive them.
550 * publicqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
551 public feed listeners.
552 * ombqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to OpenMicroBlogging
553 recipients on foreign servers.
554 * smsqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to SMS-over-email addresses
556 * xmppconfirmhandler.php - sends confirmation messages to registered
558 * twitterqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to Twitter for user
559 who have opted to set up Twitter bridging.
560 * facebookqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to Facebook for users
561 of the built-in Facebook application.
563 Note that these queue daemons are pretty raw, and need your care. In
564 particular, they leak memory, and you may want to restart them on a
565 regular (daily or so) basis with a cron job. Also, if they lose
566 the connection to the XMPP server for too long, they'll simply die. It
567 may be a good idea to use a daemon-monitoring service, like 'monit',
568 to check their status and keep them running.
570 All the daemons write their process IDs (pids) to /var/run/ by
571 default. This can be useful for starting, stopping, and monitoring the
574 Twitter Friends Syncing
575 -----------------------
577 As of Laconica 0.6.3, users may set a flag in their settings ("Subscribe
578 to my Twitter friends here" under the Twitter tab) to have Laconica
579 attempt to locate and subscribe to "friends" (people they "follow") on
580 Twitter who also have accounts on your Laconica system, and who have
581 previously set up a link for automatically posting notices to Twitter.
583 Optionally, there is a script (./scripts/synctwitterfriends.php), meant
584 to be run periodically from a job scheduler (e.g.: cron under Unix), to
585 look for new additions to users' friends lists. Note that the friends
586 syncing only subscribes users to each other, it does not unsubscribe
587 users when they stop following each other on Twitter.
591 # Update Twitter friends subscriptions every half hour
592 0,30 * * * * /path/to/php /path/to/laconica/scripts/synctwitterfriends.php>&/dev/null
594 Built-in Facebook Application
595 -----------------------------
597 Laconica's Facebook application allows your users to automatically
598 update their Facebook statuses with their latest notices, invite
599 their friends to use the app (and thus your site), view their notice
600 timelines, and post notices -- all from within Facebook. The application
601 is built into Laconica and runs on your host. For automatic Facebook
602 status updating to work you will need to enable queuing and run the
603 facebookqueuehandler.php daemon (see the "Queues and daemons" section
606 Quick setup instructions*:
608 Install the Facebook Developer application on Facebook:
610 http://www.facebook.com/developers/
612 Use it to create a new application and generate an API key and secret.
613 Uncomment the Facebook app section of your config.php and copy in the
614 key and secret, e.g.:
616 # Config section for the built-in Facebook application
617 $config['facebook']['apikey'] = 'APIKEY';
618 $config['facebook']['secret'] = 'SECRET';
620 In Facebook's application editor, specify the following URLs for your app:
622 - Callback URL: http://example.net/mublog/facebook/
623 - Post-Remove URL: http://example.net/mublog/facebook/remove
624 - Post-Add Redirect URL: http://apps.facebook.com/yourapp/
625 - Canvas URL: http://apps.facebook.com/yourapp/
627 (Replace 'example.net' with your host's URL, 'mublog' with the path
628 to your Laconica installation, and 'yourapp' with the name of the
629 Facebook application you created.)
631 Additionally, Choose "Web" for Application type in the Advanced tab.
632 In the "Canvas setting" section, choose the "FBML" for Render Method,
633 "Smart Size" for IFrame size, and "Full width (760px)" for Canvas Width.
634 Everything else can be left with default values.
636 *For more detailed instructions please see the installation guide on the
639 http://laconi.ca/trac/wiki/FacebookApplication
644 Sitemap files <http://sitemaps.org/> are a very nice way of telling
645 search engines and other interested bots what's available on your site
646 and what's changed recently. You can generate sitemap files for your
649 1. Choose your sitemap URL layout. Laconica creates a number of
650 sitemap XML files for different parts of your site. You may want to
651 put these in a sub-directory of your Laconica directory to avoid
652 clutter. The sitemap index file tells the search engines and other
653 bots where to find all the sitemap files; it *must* be in the main
654 installation directory or higher. Both types of file must be
655 available through HTTP.
657 2. To generate your sitemaps, run the following command on your server:
659 php scripts/sitemap.php -f index-file-path -d sitemap-directory -u URL-prefix-for-sitemaps
661 Here, index-file-path is the full path to the sitemap index file,
662 like './sitemapindex.xml'. sitemap-directory is the directory where
663 you want the sitemaps stored, like './sitemaps/' (make sure the dir
664 exists). URL-prefix-for-sitemaps is the full URL for the sitemap dir,
665 typically something like <http://example.net/mublog/sitemaps/>.
667 You can use several methods for submitting your sitemap index to
668 search engines to get your site indexed. One is to add a line like the
669 following to your robots.txt file:
671 Sitemap: /mublog/sitemapindex.xml
673 This is a good idea for letting *all* Web spiders know about your
674 sitemap. You can also submit sitemap files to major search engines
675 using their respective "Webmaster centres"; see sitemaps.org for links
681 There are two themes shipped with this version of Laconica: "identica",
682 which is what the Identi.ca site uses, and "default", which is a good
683 basis for other sites.
685 As of right now, your ability to change the theme is site-wide; users
686 can't choose their own theme. Additionally, the only thing you can
687 change in the theme is CSS stylesheets and some image files; you can't
688 change the HTML output, like adding or removing menu items.
690 You can choose a theme using the $config['site']['theme'] element in
691 the config.php file. See below for details.
693 You can add your own theme by making a sub-directory of the 'theme'
694 subdirectory with the name of your theme. Each theme can have the
697 display.css: a CSS2 file for "default" styling for all browsers.
698 ie6.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
700 ie7.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
702 logo.png: a logo image for the site.
703 default-avatar-profile.png: a 96x96 pixel image to use as the avatar for
704 users who don't upload their own.
705 default-avatar-stream.png: Ditto, but 48x48. For streams of notices.
706 default-avatar-mini.png: Ditto ditto, but 24x24. For subscriptions
707 listing on profile pages.
709 You may want to start by copying the files from the default theme to
712 NOTE: the HTML generated by Laconica changed *radically* between
713 version 0.6.x and 0.7.x. Older themes will need signification
714 modification to use the new output format.
719 Translations in Laconica use the gettext system <http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/>.
720 Theoretically, you can add your own sub-directory to the locale/
721 subdirectory to add a new language to your system. You'll need to
722 compile the ".po" files into ".mo" files, however.
724 Contributions of translation information to Laconica are very easy:
725 you can use the Web interface at http://laconi.ca/pootle/ to add one
726 or a few or lots of new translations -- or even new languages. You can
727 also download more up-to-date .po files there, if you so desire.
732 There is no built-in system for doing backups in Laconica. You can make
733 backups of a working Laconica system by backing up the database and
734 the Web directory. To backup the database use mysqldump <http://ur1.ca/7xo>
735 and to backup the Web directory, try tar.
740 The administrator can set the "private" flag for a site so that it's
741 not visible to non-logged-in users. This might be useful for
742 workgroups who want to share a microblogging site for project
743 management, but host it on a public server.
745 Note that this is an experimental feature; total privacy is not
746 guaranteed or ensured. Also, privacy is all-or-nothing for a site; you
747 can't have some accounts or notices private, and others public.
748 Finally, the interaction of private sites with OpenMicroBlogging is
749 undefined. Remote users won't be able to subscribe to users on a
750 private site, but users of the private site may be able to subscribe
751 to users on a remote site. (Or not... it's not well tested.) The
752 "proper behaviour" hasn't been defined here, so handle with care.
757 If you've been using Laconica 0.6, 0.5 or lower, or if you've been
758 tracking the "git" version of the software, you will probably want
759 to upgrade and keep your existing data. There is no automated upgrade
760 procedure in Laconica 0.7.1. Try these step-by-step instructions; read
761 to the end first before trying them.
763 0. Download Laconica and set up all the prerequisites as if you were
765 1. Make backups of both your database and your Web directory. UNDER NO
766 CIRCUMSTANCES should you try to do an upgrade without a known-good
767 backup. You have been warned.
768 2. Shut down Web access to your site, either by turning off your Web
769 server or by redirecting all pages to a "sorry, under maintenance"
771 3. Shut down XMPP access to your site, typically by shutting down the
772 xmppdaemon.php process and all other daemons that you're running.
773 If you've got "monit" or "cron" automatically restarting your
774 daemons, make sure to turn that off, too.
775 4. Shut down SMS and email access to your site. The easy way to do
776 this is to comment out the line piping incoming email to your
777 maildaemon.php file, and running something like "newaliases".
778 5. Once all writing processes to your site are turned off, make a
779 final backup of the Web directory and database.
780 6. Move your Laconica directory to a backup spot, like "mublog.bak".
781 7. Unpack your Laconica 0.6 tarball and move it to "mublog" or
782 wherever your code used to be.
783 8. Copy the config.php file and avatar directory from your old
784 directory to your new directory.
785 9. Copy htaccess.sample to .htaccess in the new directory. Change the
786 RewriteBase to use the correct path.
787 10. Rebuild the database. For MySQL, go to your Laconica directory and
788 run the rebuilddb.sh script like this:
790 ./scripts/rebuilddb.sh rootuser rootpassword database db/laconica.sql
792 Here, rootuser and rootpassword are the username and password for a
793 user who can drop and create databases as well as tables; typically
794 that's _not_ the user Laconica runs as.
795 For PostgreSQL databases there is an equivalent, rebuilddb_psql.sh,
796 which operates slightly differently. Read the documentation in that
797 script before running it.
798 11. Use mysql or psql client to log into your database and make sure that
799 the notice, user, profile, subscription etc. tables are non-empty.
800 12. Turn back on the Web server, and check that things still work.
801 13. Turn back on XMPP bots and email maildaemon. Note that the XMPP
802 bots have changed since version 0.5; see above for details.
804 If you're upgrading from very old versions, you may want to look at
805 the fixup_* scripts in the scripts directories. These will store some
806 precooked data in the DB. All upgraders should check out the inboxes
809 NOTE: the database definition file, stoica.ini, has been renamed to
810 laconica.ini (since this is the recommended database name). If you
811 have a line in your config.php pointing to the old name, you'll need
817 Before version 0.6.2, the page showing all notices from people the
818 user is subscribed to ("so-and-so with friends") was calculated at run
819 time. Starting with 0.6.2, we have a new data structure for holding a
820 user's "notice inbox". (Note: distinct from the "message inbox", which
821 is the "inbox" tab in the UI. The notice inbox appears under the
824 Notices are added to the inbox when they're created. This speeds up
825 the query considerably, and also allows us the opportunity, in the
826 future, to add different kind of notices to an inbox -- like @-replies
827 or subscriptions to search terms or hashtags.
829 Notice inboxes are enabled by default for new installations. If you
830 are upgrading an existing site, this means that your users will see
831 empty "Personal" pages. The following steps will help you fix the
834 0. $config['inboxes']['enabled'] can be set to one of three values. If
835 you set it to 'false', the site will work as before. Support for this
836 will probably be dropped in future versions.
837 1. Setting the flag to 'transitional' means that you're in transition.
838 In this mode, the code will run the "new query" or the "old query"
839 based on whether the user's inbox has been updated.
840 2. After setting the flag to "transitional", you can run the
841 fixup_inboxes.php script to create the inboxes. You may want to set
842 the memory limit high. You can re-run it without ill effect.
843 3. When fixup_inboxes is finished, you can set the enabled flag to
846 Configuration options
847 =====================
849 The sole configuration file for Laconica (excepting configurations for
850 dependency software) is config.php in your Laconica directory. If you
851 edit any other file in the directory, like lib/common.php (where most
852 of the defaults are defined), you will lose your configuration options
853 in any upgrade, and you will wish that you had been more careful.
855 Starting with version 0.7.1, you can put config files in the
856 /etc/laconica/ directory on your server, if it exists. Config files
857 will be included in this order:
859 * /etc/laconica/laconica.php - server-wide config
860 * /etc/laconica/<servername>.php - for a virtual host
861 * /etc/laconica/<servername>_<pathname>.php - for a path
862 * INSTALLDIR/config.php - for a particular implementation
864 Almost all configuration options are made through a two-dimensional
865 associative array, cleverly named $config. A typical configuration
868 $config['section']['option'] = value;
870 For brevity, the following documentation describes each section and
876 This section is a catch-all for site-wide variables.
878 name: the name of your site, like 'YourCompany Microblog'.
879 server: the server part of your site's URLs, like 'example.net'.
880 path: The path part of your site's URLs, like 'mublog' or ''
882 fancy: whether or not your site uses fancy URLs (see Fancy URLs
883 section above). Default is false.
884 logfile: full path to a file for Laconica to save logging
885 information to. You may want to use this if you don't have
887 locale_path: full path to the directory for locale data. Unless you
888 store all your locale data in one place, you probably
889 don't need to use this.
890 language: default language for your site. Defaults to US English.
891 languages: A list of languages supported on your site. Typically you'd
892 only change this if you wanted to disable support for one
894 "unset($config['site']['languages']['de'])" will disable
896 theme: Theme for your site (see Theme section). Two themes are
897 provided by default: 'default' and 'stoica' (the one used by
898 Identi.ca). It's appreciated if you don't use the 'stoica' theme
899 except as the basis for your own.
900 email: contact email address for your site. By default, it's extracted
901 from your Web server environment; you may want to customize it.
902 broughtbyurl: name of an organization or individual who provides the
903 service. Each page will include a link to this name in the
904 footer. A good way to link to the blog, forum, wiki,
905 corporate portal, or whoever is making the service available.
906 broughtby: text used for the "brought by" link.
907 timezone: default timezone for message display. Users can set their
908 own time zone. Defaults to 'UTC', which is a pretty good default.
909 closed: If set to 'true', will disallow registration on your site.
910 This is a cheap way to restrict accounts to only one
911 individual or group; just register the accounts you want on
912 the service, *then* set this variable to 'true'.
913 inviteonly: If set to 'true', will only allow registration if the user
914 was invited by an existing user.
915 private: If set to 'true', anonymous users will be redirected to the
916 'login' page. Also, API methods that normally require no
917 authentication will require it. Note that this does not turn
918 off registration; use 'closed' or 'inviteonly' for the
920 notice: A plain string that will appear on every page. A good place
921 to put introductory information about your service, or info about
922 upgrades and outages, or other community info. Any HTML will
924 dupelimit: Time in which it's not OK for the same person to post the
925 same notice; default = 60 seconds.
926 logo: URL of an image file to use as the logo for the site. Overrides
927 the logo in the theme, if any.
932 This section is a reference to the configuration options for
933 DB_DataObject (see <http://ur1.ca/7xp>). The ones that you may want to
934 set are listed below for clarity.
936 database: a DSN (Data Source Name) for your Laconica database. This is
937 in the format 'protocol://username:password@hostname/databasename',
938 where 'protocol' is 'mysql' or 'mysqli' (or possibly 'postgresql', if you
939 really know what you're doing), 'username' is the username,
940 'password' is the password, and etc.
941 ini_yourdbname: if your database is not named 'laconica', you'll need
942 to set this to point to the location of the
943 laconica.ini file. Note that the real name of your database
944 should go in there, not literally 'yourdbname'.
945 db_driver: You can try changing this to 'MDB2' to use the other driver
946 type for DB_DataObject, but note that it breaks the OpenID
947 libraries, which only support PEAR::DB.
948 debug: On a database error, you may get a message saying to set this
949 value to 5 to see debug messages in the browser. This breaks
950 just about all pages, and will also expose the username and
952 quote_identifiers: Set this to true if you're using postgresql.
953 type: either 'mysql' or 'postgresql' (used for some bits of
954 database-type-specific SQL in the code). Defaults to mysql.
955 mirror: you can set this to an array of DSNs, like the above
956 'database' value. If it's set, certain read-only actions will
957 use a random value out of this array for the database, rather
958 than the one in 'database' (actually, 'database' is overwritten).
959 You can offload a busy DB server by setting up MySQL replication
960 and adding the slaves to this array. Note that if you want some
961 requests to go to the 'database' (master) server, you'll need
962 to include it in this array, too.
967 By default, Laconica sites log error messages to the syslog facility.
968 (You can override this using the 'logfile' parameter described above).
970 appname: The name that Laconica uses to log messages. By default it's
971 "laconica", but if you have more than one installation on the
972 server, you may want to change the name for each instance so
973 you can track log messages more easily.
978 You can configure the software to queue time-consuming tasks, like
979 sending out SMS email or XMPP messages, for off-line processing. See
980 'Queues and daemons' above for how to set this up.
982 enabled: Whether to uses queues. Defaults to false.
987 The default license to use for your users notices. The default is the
988 Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which is probably the right
989 choice for any public site. Note that some other servers will not
990 accept notices if you apply a stricter license than this.
992 url: URL of the license, used for links.
993 title: Title for the license, like 'Creative Commons Attribution 3.0'.
994 image: A button shown on each page for the license.
999 This is for configuring out-going email. We use PEAR's Mail module,
1000 see: http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.mail.mail.factory.php
1002 backend: the backend to use for mail, one of 'mail', 'sendmail', and
1003 'smtp'. Defaults to PEAR's default, 'mail'.
1004 params: if the mail backend requires any parameters, you can provide
1005 them in an associative array.
1010 This is for configuring nicknames in the service.
1012 blacklist: an array of strings for usernames that may not be
1013 registered. A default array exists for strings that are
1014 used by Laconica (e.g. 'doc', 'main', 'avatar', 'theme')
1015 but you may want to add others if you have other software
1016 installed in a subdirectory of Laconica or if you just
1017 don't want certain words used as usernames.
1018 featured: an array of nicknames of 'featured' users of the site.
1019 Can be useful to draw attention to well-known users, or
1020 interesting people, or whatever.
1025 For configuring avatar access.
1027 server: If set, defines another server where avatars are stored in the
1028 root directory. Note that the 'avatar' subdir still has to be
1029 writeable. You'd typically use this to split HTTP requests on
1030 the client to speed up page loading, either with another
1031 virtual server or with an NFS or SAMBA share. Clients
1032 typically only make 2 connections to a single server at a
1033 time <http://ur1.ca/6ih>, so this can parallelize the job.
1039 For configuring the public stream.
1041 localonly: If set to true, only messages posted by users of this
1042 service (rather than other services, filtered through OMB)
1043 are shown in the public stream. Default true.
1044 blacklist: An array of IDs of users to hide from the public stream.
1045 Useful if you have someone making excessive Twitterfeed posts
1046 to the site, other kinds of automated posts, testing bots, etc.
1051 server: Like avatars, you can speed up page loading by pointing the
1052 theme file lookup to another server (virtual or real). The
1053 theme server's root path should map to the Laconica "theme"
1054 subdirectory. Defaults to NULL.
1059 For configuring the XMPP sub-system.
1061 enabled: Whether to accept and send messages by XMPP. Default false.
1062 server: server part of XMPP ID for update user.
1063 port: connection port for clients. Default 5222, which you probably
1064 shouldn't need to change.
1065 user: username for the client connection. Users will receive messages
1066 from 'user'@'server'.
1067 resource: a unique identifier for the connection to the server. This
1068 is actually used as a prefix for each XMPP component in the system.
1069 password: password for the user account.
1070 host: some XMPP domains are served by machines with a different
1071 hostname. (For example, @gmail.com GTalk users connect to
1072 talk.google.com). Set this to the correct hostname if that's the
1073 case with your server.
1074 encryption: Whether to encrypt the connection between Laconica and the
1075 XMPP server. Defaults to true, but you can get
1076 considerably better performance turning it off if you're
1077 connecting to a server on the same machine or on a
1079 debug: if turned on, this will make the XMPP library blurt out all of
1080 the incoming and outgoing messages as XML stanzas. Use as a
1081 last resort, and never turn it on if you don't have queues
1082 enabled, since it will spit out sensitive data to the browser.
1083 public: an array of JIDs to send _all_ notices to. This is useful for
1084 participating in third-party search and archiving services.
1089 Miscellaneous tagging stuff.
1091 dropoff: Decay factor for tag listing, in seconds.
1092 Defaults to exponential decay over ten days; you can twiddle
1093 with it to try and get better results for your site.
1098 For daemon processes.
1100 piddir: directory that daemon processes should write their PID file
1101 (process ID) to. Defaults to /var/run/, which is where this
1102 stuff should usually go on Unix-ish systems.
1103 user: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective user ID
1104 to this user before running. Probably a good idea, especially if
1105 you start the daemons as root. Note: user name, like 'daemon',
1107 group: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective group ID
1108 to this named group. Again, a name, not a numerical ID.
1113 You can get a significant boost in performance by caching some
1114 database data in memcached <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>.
1116 enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
1117 server: a string with the hostname of the memcached server. Can also
1118 be an array of hostnames, if you've got more than one server.
1123 You can get a significant boost in performance using Sphinx Search
1124 instead of your database server to search for users and notices.
1125 <http://sphinxsearch.com/>.
1127 enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
1128 server: a string with the hostname of the sphinx server.
1129 port: an integer with the port number of the sphinx server.
1134 A catch-all for integration with other systems.
1136 source: The name to use for the source of posts to Twitter. Defaults
1137 to 'laconica', but if you request your own source name from
1138 Twitter <http://twitter.com/help/request_source>, you can use
1139 that here instead. Status updates on Twitter will then have
1147 enabled: A three-valued flag for whether to use notice inboxes (see
1148 upgrading info above for notes about this change). Can be
1149 'false', 'true', or '"transitional"'.
1154 For notice-posting throttles.
1156 enabled: Whether to throttle posting. Defaults to false.
1157 count: Each user can make this many posts in 'timespan' seconds. So, if count
1158 is 100 and timespan is 3600, then there can be only 100 posts
1159 from a user every hour.
1160 timespan: see 'count'.
1167 banned: an array of usernames and/or profile IDs of 'banned' profiles.
1168 The site will reject any notices by these users -- they will
1169 not be accepted at all. (Compare with blacklisted users above,
1170 whose posts just won't show up in the public stream.)
1175 The primary output for Laconica is syslog, unless you configured a
1176 separate logfile. This is probably the first place to look if you're
1177 getting weird behaviour from Laconica.
1179 If you're tracking the unstable version of Laconica in the git
1180 repository (see below), and you get a compilation error ("unexpected
1181 T_STRING") in the browser, check to see that you don't have any
1182 conflicts in your code.
1184 If you upgraded to Laconica 0.7.1 without reading the "Notice inboxes"
1185 section above, and all your users' 'Personal' tabs are empty, read the
1186 "Notice inboxes" section above.
1191 These are some myths you may see on the Web about Laconica.
1192 Documentation from the core team about Laconica has been pretty
1193 sparse, so some backtracking and guesswork resulted in some incorrect
1196 - "Set $config['db']['debug'] = 5 to debug the database." This is an
1197 extremely bad idea. It's a tool built into DB_DataObject that will
1198 emit oodles of print lines directly to the browser of your users.
1199 Among these lines will be your database username and password. Do
1200 not enable this option on a production Web site for any reason.
1202 - "Edit dataobject.ini with the following settings..." dataobject.ini
1203 is a development file for the DB_DataObject framework and is not
1204 used by the running software. It was removed from the Laconica
1205 distribution because its presence was confusing. Do not bother
1206 configuring dataobject.ini, and do not put your database username
1207 and password into the file on a production Web server; unscrupulous
1208 persons may try to read it to get your passwords.
1213 If you're adventurous or impatient, you may want to install the
1214 development version of Laconica. To get it, use the git version
1215 control tool <http://git-scm.com/> like so:
1217 git clone http://laconi.ca/software/laconica.git
1219 To keep it up-to-date, use 'git pull'. Watch for conflicts!
1224 There are several ways to get more information about Laconica.
1226 * There is a mailing list for Laconica developers and admins at
1227 http://mail.laconi.ca/mailman/listinfo/laconica-dev
1228 * The #laconica IRC channel on freenode.net <http://www.freenode.net/>.
1229 * The Laconica wiki, http://laconi.ca/trac/
1234 * Microblogging messages to http://identi.ca/evan are very welcome.
1235 * Laconica's Trac server has a bug tracker for any defects you may find,
1236 or ideas for making things better. http://laconi.ca/trac/
1237 * e-mail to evan@identi.ca will usually be read and responded to very
1238 quickly, unless the question is really hard.
1243 The following is an incomplete list of developers who've worked on
1244 Laconi.ca. Apologies for any oversight; please let evan@identi.ca know
1245 if anyone's been overlooked in error.
1247 * Evan Prodromou, founder and lead developer, Control Yourself, Inc.
1248 * Zach Copley, Control Yourself, Inc.
1249 * Earle Martin, Control Yourself, Inc.
1250 * Marie-Claude Doyon, designer, Control Yourself, Inc.
1251 * Sarven Capadisli, Control Yourself, Inc.
1252 * Robin Millette, Control Yourself, Inc.
1263 * Tryggvi Björgvinsson
1267 * Ken Sheppardson (Trac server, man-about-town)
1268 * Tiago 'gouki' Faria (i18n managerx)
1270 * Leslie Michael Orchard
1274 Thanks also to the developers of our upstream library code and to the
1275 thousands of people who have tried out Identi.ca, installed Laconi.ca,
1276 told their friends, and built the Open Microblogging network to what