5 Laconica 0.7.1 ("West of the Fields")
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 release since version 0.7.0, released Jan 29
75 2009. Notable changes this version:
77 - Vast improvement in auto-linking to URLs.
78 - Link to group search from user's group page
79 - Improved interface in Facebook application
80 - Fix bad redirects in delete notice
81 - Updated PostgreSQL database creation script
82 - Show filesize in avatar/logo upload
83 - Vastly improved avatar/logo upload
84 - Allow re-authentication with OpenID
85 - Correctly link hashtabs inside parens and brackets
86 - Group and avatar image transparency works
87 - Better handling of commands through the Web and Ajax channels
88 - Fix links for profile page feeds
89 - Fixed destroy method in API
90 - Fix endpoint of Connect menu when XMPP disabled
91 - Show number of group members
92 - Enable configuration files in /etc/laconica/
94 Changes in version 0.7.0:
96 - Support for groups. Users can join groups and send themed notices
97 to those groups. All other members of the group receive the notices.
98 - Laconica-specific extensions to the Twitter API.
99 - A Facebook application.
100 - A massive UI redesign. The HTML generated by Laconica has changed
101 significantly, to make theming easier and to give a more open look
102 by default. Also, sidebar.
103 - Massive code hygiene changes to move towards compliance with the PEAR
104 coding standards and to support the new UI redesign.
105 - Began the breakup of util.php -- moved about 30% of code to a views
107 - UI elements for statistical information (like top posters or most
108 popular groups) added in a sidebar.
109 - include Javascript badge by Kent Brewster.
110 - Updated online documentation.
111 - Cropping of user avatars using Jcrop.
112 - fix for Twitter bridge to not send "Expect:" headers.
113 - add 'dm' as a synonym for 'd' in commands.
114 - Upgrade upstream version of jQuery to 1.3.
115 - Upgrade upstream version of PHP-OpenID to 2.1.2.
116 - Move OpenMicroBlogging specification to its own repository.
117 - Make tag-based RSS streams work.
118 - Additional locales: Bulgarian, Catalan, Greek, Hebrew, simplified
119 Chinese, Telugu, Taiwanese Chinese, Vietnamese,
120 - PostgreSQL updates.
121 - Nasty bug in Twitter bridge that wouldn't verify with Twitter
126 The following software packages are *required* for this software to
129 - PHP 5.2.x. It may be possible to run this software on earlier
130 versions of PHP, but many of the functions used are only available
132 - MySQL 5.x. The Laconica database is stored, by default, in a MySQL
133 server. It has been primarily tested on 5.x servers, although it may
134 be possible to install on earlier (or later!) versions. The server
135 *must* support the MyISAM storage engine -- the default for most
136 MySQL servers -- *and* the InnoDB storage engine.
137 - A Web server. Preferably, you should have Apache 2.2.x with the
138 mod_rewrite extension installed and enabled.
140 Your PHP installation must include the following PHP extensions:
142 - Curl. This is for fetching files by HTTP.
143 - XMLWriter. This is for formatting XML and HTML output.
144 - MySQL. For accessing the database.
145 - GD. For scaling down avatar images.
146 - mbstring. For handling Unicode (UTF-8) encoded strings.
147 - gettext. For multiple languages. Default on many PHP installs.
149 For some functionality, you will also need the following extensions:
151 - Memcache. A client for the memcached server, which caches database
152 information in volatile memory. This is important for adequate
153 performance on high-traffic sites. You will also need a memcached
154 server to store the data in.
155 - Mailparse. Efficient parsing of email requires this extension.
156 Submission by email or SMS-over-email uses this extension.
157 - Sphinx Search. A client for the sphinx server, an alternative
158 to MySQL or Postgresql fulltext search. You will also need a
159 Sphinx server to serve the search queries.
161 You will almost definitely get 2-3 times better performance from your
162 site if you install a PHP bytecode cache/accelerator. Some well-known
163 examples are: eaccelerator, Turck mmcache, xcache, apc. Zend Optimizer
164 is a proprietary accelerator installed on some hosting sites.
169 A number of external PHP libraries are used to provide basic
170 functionality and optional functionality for your system. For your
171 convenience, they are available in the "extlib" directory of this
172 package, and you do not have to download and install them. However,
173 you may want to keep them up-to-date with the latest upstream version,
174 and the URLs are listed here for your convenience.
176 - DB_DataObject http://pear.php.net/package/DB_DataObject
177 - Validate http://pear.php.net/package/Validate
178 - OpenID from OpenIDEnabled (not the PEAR version!). We decided
179 to use the openidenabled.com version since it's more widely
180 implemented, and seems to be better supported.
181 http://openidenabled.com/php-openid/
182 - PEAR DB. Although this is an older data access system (new
183 packages should probably use PHP DBO), the OpenID libraries
184 depend on PEAR DB so we use it here, too. DB_DataObject can
185 also use PEAR MDB2, which may give you better performance
186 but won't work with OpenID.
187 http://pear.php.net/package/DB
188 - OAuth.php from http://oauth.googlecode.com/svn/code/php/
189 - markdown.php from http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/
190 - PEAR Mail, for sending out mail notifications
191 http://pear.php.net/package/Mail
192 - PEAR Net_SMTP, if you use the SMTP factory for notifications
193 http://pear.php.net/package/Net_SMTP
194 - PEAR Net_Socket, if you use the SMTP factory for notifications
195 http://pear.php.net/package/Net_Socket
196 - XMPPHP, the follow-up to Class.Jabber.php. Probably the best XMPP
197 library available for PHP. http://xmpphp.googlecode.com/. Note that
198 as of this writing the version of this library that is available in
199 the extlib directory is *significantly different* from the upstream
200 version (patches have been submitted). Upgrading to the upstream
201 version may render your Laconica site unable to send or receive XMPP
203 - Facebook library. Used for the Facebook application.
204 - PEAR Services_oEmbed. Used for some multimedia integration.
205 - PEAR HTTP_Request is an oEmbed dependency.
206 - PEAR Validat is an oEmbed dependency.e
207 - PEAR Net_URL is an oEmbed dependency.2
209 A design goal of Laconica is that the basic Web functionality should
210 work on even the most restrictive commercial hosting services.
211 However, additional functionality, such as receiving messages by
212 Jabber/GTalk, require that you be able to run long-running processes
213 on your account. In addition, posting by email or from SMS require
214 that you be able to install a mail filter in your mail server.
219 Installing the basic Laconica Web component is relatively easy,
220 especially if you've previously installed PHP/MySQL packages.
222 1. Unpack the tarball you downloaded on your Web server. Usually a
223 command like this will work:
225 tar zxf laconica-0.7.1.tar.gz
227 ...which will make a laconica-0.7.1 subdirectory in your current
228 directory. (If you don't have shell access on your Web server, you
229 may have to unpack the tarball on your local computer and FTP the
230 files to the server.)
232 2. Move the tarball to a directory of your choosing in your Web root
233 directory. Usually something like this will work:
235 mv laconica-0.7.1 /var/www/mublog
237 This will make your Laconica instance available in the mublog path of
238 your server, like "http://example.net/mublog". "microblog" or
239 "laconica" might also be good path names. If you know how to
240 configure virtual hosts on your web server, you can try setting up
241 "http://micro.example.net/" or the like.
243 3. You should also take this moment to make your avatar subdirectory
244 writeable by the Web server. An insecure way to do this is:
246 chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/avatar
248 On some systems, this will probably work:
250 chgrp www-data /var/www/mublog/avatar
251 chmod g+w /var/www/mublog/avatar
253 If your Web server runs as another user besides "www-data", try
254 that user's default group instead. As a last resort, you can create
255 a new group like "avatar" and add the Web server's user to the group.
257 4. Create a database to hold your microblog data. Something like this
260 mysqladmin -u "username" --password="password" create laconica
262 Note that Laconica must have its own database; you can't share the
263 database with another program. You can name it whatever you want,
266 (If you don't have shell access to your server, you may need to use
267 a tool like PHPAdmin to create a database. Check your hosting
268 service's documentation for how to create a new MySQL database.)
270 5. Run the laconica.sql SQL script in the db subdirectory to create
271 the database tables in the database. A typical system would work
274 mysql -u "username" --password="password" laconica < /var/www/mublog/db/laconica.sql
276 You may want to test by logging into the database and checking that
277 the tables were created. Here's an example:
281 6. Create a new database account that Laconica will use to access the
282 database. If you have shell access, this will probably work from the
285 GRANT SELECT,INSERT,DELETE,UPDATE on laconica.*
286 TO 'lacuser'@'localhost'
287 IDENTIFIED BY 'lacpassword';
289 You should change 'lacuser' and 'lacpassword' to your preferred new
290 username and password. You may want to test logging in as this new
291 user and testing that you can SELECT from some of the tables in the
292 DB (use SHOW TABLES to see which ones are there).
294 7. Copy the config.php.sample in the Laconica directory to config.php.
296 8. Edit config.php to set the basic configuration for your system.
297 (See descriptions below for basic config options.) Note that there
298 are lots of options and if you try to do them all at once, you will
299 have a hard time making sure what's working and what's not. So,
300 stick with the basics at first. In particular, customizing the
301 'site' and 'db' settings will almost definitely be needed.
303 9. At this point, you should be able to navigate in a browser to your
304 microblog's main directory and see the "Public Timeline", which
305 will be empty. If not, magic has happened! You can now register a
306 new user, post some notices, edit your profile, etc. However, you
307 may want to wait to do that stuff if you think you can set up
308 "fancy URLs" (see below), since some URLs are stored in the database.
313 By default, Laconica will have big long sloppy URLs that are hard for
314 people to remember or use. For example, a user's home profile might be
317 http://example.org/mublog/index.php?action=showstream&nickname=fred
319 It's possible to configure the software so it looks like this instead:
321 http://example.org/mublog/fred
323 These "fancy URLs" are more readable and memorable for users. To use
324 fancy URLs, you must either have Apache 2.2.x with .htaccess enabled
325 and mod_redirect enabled, -OR- know how to configure "url redirection"
328 1. Copy the htaccess.sample file to .htaccess in your Laconica
329 directory. Note: if you have control of your server's httpd.conf or
330 similar configuration files, it can greatly improve performance to
331 import the .htaccess file into your conf file instead. If you're
332 not sure how to do it, you may save yourself a lot of headache by
333 just leaving the .htaccess file.
335 2. Change the "RewriteBase" in the new .htaccess file to be the URL path
336 to your Laconica installation on your server. Typically this will
337 be the path to your Laconica directory relative to your Web root.
339 3. Add or uncomment or change a line in your config.php file so it says:
341 $config['site']['fancy'] = true;
343 You should now be able to navigate to a "fancy" URL on your server,
346 http://example.net/mublog/main/register
348 If you changed your HTTP server configuration, you may need to restart
351 If you have problems with the .htaccess file on versions of Apache
352 earlier than 2.2.x, try changing the regular expressions in the
353 htaccess.sample file that use "\w" to just use ".".
358 To use a Sphinx server to search users and notices, you also need
359 to install, compile and enable the sphinx pecl extension for php on the
360 client side, which itself depends on the sphinx development files.
361 "pecl install sphinx" should take care of that. Add "extension=sphinx.so"
362 to your php.ini and reload apache to enable it.
364 You can update your MySQL or Postgresql databases to drop their fulltext
365 search indexes, since they're now provided by sphinx.
367 On the sphinx server side, a script reads the main database and build
368 the keyword index. A cron job reads the database and keeps the sphinx
369 indexes up to date. scripts/sphinx-cron.sh should be called by cron
370 every 5 minutes, for example. scripts/sphinx.sh is an init.d script
371 to start and stop the sphinx search daemon.
376 Laconica supports a cheap-and-dirty system for sending update messages
377 to mobile phones and for receiving updates from the mobile. Instead of
378 sending through the SMS network itself, which is costly and requires
379 buy-in from the wireless carriers, it simply piggybacks on the email
380 gateways that many carriers provide to their customers. So, SMS
381 configuration is essentially email configuration.
383 Each user sends to a made-up email address, which they keep a secret.
384 Incoming email that is "From" the user's SMS email address, and "To"
385 the users' secret email address on the site's domain, will be
386 converted to a notice and stored in the DB.
388 For this to work, there *must* be a domain or sub-domain for which all
389 (or most) incoming email can pass through the incoming mail filter.
391 1. Run the SQL script carrier.sql in your Laconica database. This will
394 mysql -u "lacuser" --password="lacpassword" laconica < db/carrier.sql
396 This will populate your database with a list of wireless carriers
397 that support email SMS gateways.
399 2. Make sure the maildaemon.php file is executable:
401 chmod +x scripts/maildaemon.php
403 Note that "daemon" is kind of a misnomer here; the script is more
404 of a filter than a daemon.
406 2. Edit /etc/aliases on your mail server and add the following line:
408 *: /path/to/laconica/scripts/maildaemon.php
410 3. Run whatever code you need to to update your aliases database. For
411 many mail servers (Postfix, Exim, Sendmail), this should work:
415 You may need to restart your mail server for the new database to
418 4. Set the following in your config.php file:
420 $config['mail']['domain'] = 'yourdomain.example.net';
422 At this point, post-by-email and post-by-SMS-gateway should work. Note
423 that if your mail server is on a different computer from your email
424 server, you'll need to have a full installation of Laconica, a working
425 config.php, and access to the Laconica database from the mail server.
430 XMPP (eXtended Message and Presence Protocol, <http://xmpp.org/>) is the
431 instant-messenger protocol that drives Jabber and GTalk IM. You can
432 distribute messages via XMPP using the system below; however, you
433 need to run the XMPP incoming daemon to allow incoming messages as
436 1. You may want to strongly consider setting up your own XMPP server.
437 Ejabberd, OpenFire, and JabberD are all Open Source servers.
438 Jabber, Inc. provides a high-performance commercial server.
440 2. You must register a Jabber ID (JID) with your new server. It helps
441 to choose a name like "update@example.com" or "notice" or something
442 similar. Alternately, your "update JID" can be registered on a
443 publicly-available XMPP service, like jabber.org or GTalk.
445 Laconica will not register the JID with your chosen XMPP server;
446 you need to do this manually, with an XMPP client like Gajim,
447 Telepathy, or Pidgin.im.
449 3. Configure your site's XMPP variables, as described below in the
450 configuration section.
452 On a default installation, your site can broadcast messages using
453 XMPP. Users won't be able to post messages using XMPP unless you've
454 got the XMPP daemon running. See 'Queues and daemons' below for how
455 to set that up. Also, once you have a sizable number of users, sending
456 a lot of SMS, OMB, and XMPP messages whenever someone posts a message
457 can really slow down your site; it may cause posting to timeout.
459 NOTE: stream_select(), a crucial function for network programming, is
460 broken on PHP 5.2.x less than 5.2.6 on amd64-based servers. We don't
461 work around this bug in Laconica; current recommendation is to move
462 off of amd64 to another server.
467 You can send *all* messages from your microblogging site to a
468 third-party service using XMPP. This can be useful for providing
469 search, indexing, bridging, or other cool services.
471 To configure a downstream site to receive your public stream, add
472 their "JID" (Jabber ID) to your config.php as follows:
474 $config['xmpp']['public'][] = 'downstream@example.net';
476 (Don't miss those square brackets at the end.) Note that your XMPP
477 broadcasting must be configured as mentioned above. Although you can
478 send out messages at "Web time", high-volume sites should strongly
479 consider setting up queues and daemons.
484 Some activities that Laconica needs to do, like broadcast OMB, SMS,
485 and XMPP messages, can be 'queued' and done by off-line bots instead.
486 For this to work, you must be able to run long-running offline
487 processes, either on your main Web server or on another server you
488 control. (Your other server will still need all the above
489 prerequisites, with the exception of Apache.) Installing on a separate
490 server is probably a good idea for high-volume sites.
492 1. You'll need the "CLI" (command-line interface) version of PHP
493 installed on whatever server you use.
495 2. If you're using a separate server for queues, install Laconica
496 somewhere on the server. You don't need to worry about the
497 .htaccess file, but make sure that your config.php file is close
498 to, or identical to, your Web server's version.
500 3. In your config.php files (both the Web server and the queues
501 server!), set the following variable:
503 $config['queue']['enabled'] = true;
505 You may also want to look at the 'daemon' section of this file for
506 more daemon options. Note that if you set the 'user' and/or 'group'
507 options, you'll need to create that user and/or group by hand.
508 They're not created automatically.
510 4. On the queues server, run the command scripts/startdaemons.sh. It
511 needs as a parameter the install path; if you run it from the
512 Laconica dir, "." should suffice.
514 This will run six (for now) queue handlers:
516 * xmppdaemon.php - listens for new XMPP messages from users and stores
517 them as notices in the database.
518 * jabberqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
519 registered users who should receive them.
520 * publicqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
521 public feed listeners.
522 * ombqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to OpenMicroBlogging
523 recipients on foreign servers.
524 * smsqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to SMS-over-email addresses
526 * xmppconfirmhandler.php - sends confirmation messages to registered
529 Note that these queue daemons are pretty raw, and need your care. In
530 particular, they leak memory, and you may want to restart them on a
531 regular (daily or so) basis with a cron job. Also, if they lose
532 the connection to the XMPP server for too long, they'll simply die. It
533 may be a good idea to use a daemon-monitoring service, like 'monit',
534 to check their status and keep them running.
536 All the daemons write their process IDs (pids) to /var/run/ by
537 default. This can be useful for starting, stopping, and monitoring the
540 Twitter Friends Syncing
541 -----------------------
543 As of Laconica 0.6.3, users may set a flag in their settings ("Subscribe
544 to my Twitter friends here" under the Twitter tab) to have Laconica
545 attempt to locate and subscribe to "friends" (people they "follow") on
546 Twitter who also have accounts on your Laconica system, and who have
547 previously set up a link for automatically posting notices to Twitter.
549 Optionally, there is a script (./scripts/synctwitterfriends.php), meant
550 to be run periodically from a job scheduler (e.g.: cron under Unix), to
551 look for new additions to users' friends lists. Note that the friends
552 syncing only subscribes users to each other, it does not unsubscribe
553 users when they stop following each other on Twitter.
557 # Update Twitter friends subscriptions every half hour
558 0,30 * * * * /path/to/php /path/to/laconica/scripts/synctwitterfriends.php>&/dev/null
563 Sitemap files <http://sitemaps.org/> are a very nice way of telling
564 search engines and other interested bots what's available on your site
565 and what's changed recently. You can generate sitemap files for your
568 1. Choose your sitemap URL layout. Laconica creates a number of
569 sitemap XML files for different parts of your site. You may want to
570 put these in a sub-directory of your Laconica directory to avoid
571 clutter. The sitemap index file tells the search engines and other
572 bots where to find all the sitemap files; it *must* be in the main
573 installation directory or higher. Both types of file must be
574 available through HTTP.
576 2. To generate your sitemaps, run the following command on your server:
578 php scripts/sitemap.php -f index-file-path -d sitemap-directory -u URL-prefix-for-sitemaps
580 Here, index-file-path is the full path to the sitemap index file,
581 like './sitemapindex.xml'. sitemap-directory is the directory where
582 you want the sitemaps stored, like './sitemaps/' (make sure the dir
583 exists). URL-prefix-for-sitemaps is the full URL for the sitemap dir,
584 typically something like <http://example.net/mublog/sitemaps/>.
586 You can use several methods for submitting your sitemap index to
587 search engines to get your site indexed. One is to add a line like the
588 following to your robots.txt file:
590 Sitemap: /mublog/sitemapindex.xml
592 This is a good idea for letting *all* Web spiders know about your
593 sitemap. You can also submit sitemap files to major search engines
594 using their respective "Webmaster centres"; see sitemaps.org for links
600 There are two themes shipped with this version of Laconica: "stoica",
601 which is what the Identi.ca site uses, and "default", which is a good
602 basis for other sites.
604 As of right now, your ability to change the theme is site-wide; users
605 can't choose their own theme. Additionally, the only thing you can
606 change in the theme is CSS stylesheets and some image files; you can't
607 change the HTML output, like adding or removing menu items.
609 You can choose a theme using the $config['site']['theme'] element in
610 the config.php file. See below for details.
612 You can add your own theme by making a sub-directory of the 'theme'
613 subdirectory with the name of your theme. Each theme can have the
616 display.css: a CSS2 file for "default" styling for all browsers.
617 ie6.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
619 ie7.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
621 logo.png: a logo image for the site.
622 default-avatar-profile.png: a 96x96 pixel image to use as the avatar for
623 users who don't upload their own.
624 default-avatar-stream.png: Ditto, but 48x48. For streams of notices.
625 default-avatar-mini.png: Ditto ditto, but 24x24. For subscriptions
626 listing on profile pages.
628 You may want to start by copying the files from the default theme to
631 NOTE: the HTML generated by Laconica changed *radically* between
632 version 0.6.x and 0.7.x. Older themes will need signification
633 modification to use the new output format.
638 Translations in Laconica use the gettext system <http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/>.
639 Theoretically, you can add your own sub-directory to the locale/
640 subdirectory to add a new language to your system. You'll need to
641 compile the ".po" files into ".mo" files, however.
643 Contributions of translation information to Laconica are very easy:
644 you can use the Web interface at http://laconi.ca/pootle/ to add one
645 or a few or lots of new translations -- or even new languages. You can
646 also download more up-to-date .po files there, if you so desire.
651 There is no built-in system for doing backups in Laconica. You can make
652 backups of a working Laconica system by backing up the database and
653 the Web directory. To backup the database use mysqldump <http://ur1.ca/7xo>
654 and to backup the Web directory, try tar.
659 The administrator can set the "private" flag for a site so that it's
660 not visible to non-logged-in users. This might be useful for
661 workgroups who want to share a microblogging site for project
662 management, but host it on a public server.
664 Note that this is an experimental feature; total privacy is not
665 guaranteed or ensured. Also, privacy is all-or-nothing for a site; you
666 can't have some accounts or notices private, and others public.
667 Finally, the interaction of private sites with OpenMicroBlogging is
668 undefined. Remote users won't be able to subscribe to users on a
669 private site, but users of the private site may be able to subscribe
670 to users on a remote site. (Or not... it's not well tested.) The
671 "proper behaviour" hasn't been defined here, so handle with care.
676 If you've been using Laconica 0.6, 0.5 or lower, or if you've been
677 tracking the "git" version of the software, you will probably want
678 to upgrade and keep your existing data. There is no automated upgrade
679 procedure in Laconica 0.7.1. Try these step-by-step instructions; read
680 to the end first before trying them.
682 0. Download Laconica and set up all the prerequisites as if you were
684 1. Make backups of both your database and your Web directory. UNDER NO
685 CIRCUMSTANCES should you try to do an upgrade without a known-good
686 backup. You have been warned.
687 2. Shut down Web access to your site, either by turning off your Web
688 server or by redirecting all pages to a "sorry, under maintenance"
690 3. Shut down XMPP access to your site, typically by shutting down the
691 xmppdaemon.php process and all other daemons that you're running.
692 If you've got "monit" or "cron" automatically restarting your
693 daemons, make sure to turn that off, too.
694 4. Shut down SMS and email access to your site. The easy way to do
695 this is to comment out the line piping incoming email to your
696 maildaemon.php file, and running something like "newaliases".
697 5. Once all writing processes to your site are turned off, make a
698 final backup of the Web directory and database.
699 6. Move your Laconica directory to a backup spot, like "mublog.bak".
700 7. Unpack your Laconica 0.6 tarball and move it to "mublog" or
701 wherever your code used to be.
702 8. Copy the config.php file and avatar directory from your old
703 directory to your new directory.
704 9. Copy htaccess.sample to .htaccess in the new directory. Change the
705 RewriteBase to use the correct path.
706 10. Rebuild the database. Go to your Laconica directory and run the
707 rebuilddb.sh script like this:
709 ./scripts/rebuilddb.sh rootuser rootpassword database db/laconica.sql
711 Here, rootuser and rootpassword are the username and password for a
712 user who can drop and create databases as well as tables; typically
713 that's _not_ the user Laconica runs as.
714 11. Use mysql client to log into your database and make sure that the
715 notice, user, profile, subscription etc. tables are non-empty.
716 12. Turn back on the Web server, and check that things still work.
717 13. Turn back on XMPP bots and email maildaemon. Note that the XMPP
718 bots have changed since version 0.5; see above for details.
720 If you're upgrading from very old versions, you may want to look at
721 the fixup_* scripts in the scripts directories. These will store some
722 precooked data in the DB. All upgraders should check out the inboxes
725 NOTE: the database definition file, stoica.ini, has been renamed to
726 laconica.ini (since this is the recommended database name). If you
727 have a line in your config.php pointing to the old name, you'll need
733 Before version 0.6.2, the page showing all notices from people the
734 user is subscribed to ("so-and-so with friends") was calculated at run
735 time. Starting with 0.6.2, we have a new data structure for holding a
736 user's "notice inbox". (Note: distinct from the "message inbox", which
737 is the "inbox" tab in the UI. The notice inbox appears under the
740 Notices are added to the inbox when they're created. This speeds up
741 the query considerably, and also allows us the opportunity, in the
742 future, to add different kind of notices to an inbox -- like @-replies
743 or subscriptions to search terms or hashtags.
745 Notice inboxes are enabled by default for new installations. If you
746 are upgrading an existing site, this means that your users will see
747 empty "Personal" pages. The following steps will help you fix the
750 0. $config['inboxes']['enabled'] can be set to one of three values. If
751 you set it to 'false', the site will work as before. Support for this
752 will probably be dropped in future versions.
753 1. Setting the flag to 'transitional' means that you're in transition.
754 In this mode, the code will run the "new query" or the "old query"
755 based on whether the user's inbox has been updated.
756 2. After setting the flag to "transitional", you can run the
757 fixup_inboxes.php script to create the inboxes. You may want to set
758 the memory limit high. You can re-run it without ill effect.
759 3. When fixup_inboxes is finished, you can set the enabled flag to
762 Configuration options
763 =====================
765 The sole configuration file for Laconica (excepting configurations for
766 dependency software) is config.php in your Laconica directory. If you
767 edit any other file in the directory, like lib/common.php (where most
768 of the defaults are defined), you will lose your configuration options
769 in any upgrade, and you will wish that you had been more careful.
771 Starting with version 0.7.1, you can put config files in the
772 /etc/laconica/ directory on your server, if it exists. Config files
773 will be included in this order:
775 * /etc/laconica/laconica.php - server-wide config
776 * /etc/laconica/<servername>.php - for a virtual host
777 * /etc/laconica/<servername>_<pathname>.php - for a path
778 * INSTALLDIR/config.php - for a particular implementation
780 Almost all configuration options are made through a two-dimensional
781 associative array, cleverly named $config. A typical configuration
784 $config['section']['option'] = value;
786 For brevity, the following documentation describes each section and
792 This section is a catch-all for site-wide variables.
794 name: the name of your site, like 'YourCompany Microblog'.
795 server: the server part of your site's URLs, like 'example.net'.
796 path: The path part of your site's URLs, like 'mublog' or '/'
798 fancy: whether or not your site uses fancy URLs (see Fancy URLs
799 section above). Default is false.
800 logfile: full path to a file for Laconica to save logging
801 information to. You may want to use this if you don't have
803 locale_path: full path to the directory for locale data. Unless you
804 store all your locale data in one place, you probably
805 don't need to use this.
806 language: default language for your site. Defaults to US English.
807 languages: A list of languages supported on your site. Typically you'd
808 only change this if you wanted to disable support for one
810 "unset($config['site']['languages']['de'])" will disable
812 theme: Theme for your site (see Theme section). Two themes are
813 provided by default: 'default' and 'stoica' (the one used by
814 Identi.ca). It's appreciated if you don't use the 'stoica' theme
815 except as the basis for your own.
816 email: contact email address for your site. By default, it's extracted
817 from your Web server environment; you may want to customize it.
818 broughtbyurl: name of an organization or individual who provides the
819 service. Each page will include a link to this name in the
820 footer. A good way to link to the blog, forum, wiki,
821 corporate portal, or whoever is making the service available.
822 broughtby: text used for the "brought by" link.
823 timezone: default timezone for message display. Users can set their
824 own time zone. Defaults to 'UTC', which is a pretty good default.
825 closed: If set to 'true', will disallow registration on your site.
826 This is a cheap way to restrict accounts to only one
827 individual or group; just register the accounts you want on
828 the service, *then* set this variable to 'true'.
829 inviteonly: If set to 'true', will only allow registration if the user
830 was invited by an existing user.
831 private: If set to 'true', anonymous users will be redirected to the
832 'login' page. Also, API methods that normally require no
833 authentication will require it. Note that this does not turn
834 off registration; use 'closed' or 'inviteonly' for the
836 notice: A plain string that will appear on every page. A good place
837 to put introductory information about your service, or info about
838 upgrades and outages, or other community info. Any HTML will
844 This section is a reference to the configuration options for
845 DB_DataObject (see <http://ur1.ca/7xp>). The ones that you may want to
846 set are listed below for clarity.
848 database: a DSN (Data Source Name) for your Laconica database. This is
849 in the format 'protocol://username:password@hostname/databasename',
850 where 'protocol' is 'mysql' or 'mysqli' (or possibly 'postgresql', if you
851 really know what you're doing), 'username' is the username,
852 'password' is the password, and etc.
853 ini_yourdbname: if your database is not named 'laconica', you'll need
854 to set this to point to the location of the
855 laconica.ini file. Note that the real name of your database
856 should go in there, not literally 'yourdbname'.
857 db_driver: You can try changing this to 'MDB2' to use the other driver
858 type for DB_DataObject, but note that it breaks the OpenID
859 libraries, which only support PEAR::DB.
860 debug: On a database error, you may get a message saying to set this
861 value to 5 to see debug messages in the browser. This breaks
862 just about all pages, and will also expose the username and
864 quote_identifiers: Set this to true if you're using postgresql.
865 type: either 'mysql' or 'postgresql' (used for some bits of
866 database-type-specific SQL in the code). Defaults to mysql.
867 mirror: you can set this to an array of DSNs, like the above
868 'database' value. If it's set, certain read-only actions will
869 use a random value out of this array for the database, rather
870 than the one in 'database' (actually, 'database' is overwritten).
871 You can offload a busy DB server by setting up MySQL replication
872 and adding the slaves to this array. Note that if you want some
873 requests to go to the 'database' (master) server, you'll need
874 to include it in this array, too.
879 By default, Laconica sites log error messages to the syslog facility.
880 (You can override this using the 'logfile' parameter described above).
882 appname: The name that Laconica uses to log messages. By default it's
883 "laconica", but if you have more than one installation on the
884 server, you may want to change the name for each instance so
885 you can track log messages more easily.
890 You can configure the software to queue time-consuming tasks, like
891 sending out SMS email or XMPP messages, for off-line processing. See
892 'Queues and daemons' above for how to set this up.
894 enabled: Whether to uses queues. Defaults to false.
899 The default license to use for your users notices. The default is the
900 Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which is probably the right
901 choice for any public site. Note that some other servers will not
902 accept notices if you apply a stricter license than this.
904 url: URL of the license, used for links.
905 title: Title for the license, like 'Creative Commons Attribution 3.0'.
906 image: A button shown on each page for the license.
911 This is for configuring out-going email. We use PEAR's Mail module,
912 see: http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.mail.mail.factory.php
914 backend: the backend to use for mail, one of 'mail', 'sendmail', and
915 'smtp'. Defaults to PEAR's default, 'mail'.
916 params: if the mail backend requires any parameters, you can provide
917 them in an associative array.
922 This is for configuring nicknames in the service.
924 blacklist: an array of strings for usernames that may not be
925 registered. A default array exists for strings that are
926 used by Laconica (e.g. 'doc', 'main', 'avatar', 'theme')
927 but you may want to add others if you have other software
928 installed in a subdirectory of Laconica or if you just
929 don't want certain words used as usernames.
930 featured: an array of nicknames of 'featured' users of the site.
931 Can be useful to draw attention to well-known users, or
932 interesting people, or whatever.
937 For configuring avatar access.
939 server: If set, defines another server where avatars are stored in the
940 root directory. Note that the 'avatar' subdir still has to be
941 writeable. You'd typically use this to split HTTP requests on
942 the client to speed up page loading, either with another
943 virtual server or with an NFS or SAMBA share. Clients
944 typically only make 2 connections to a single server at a
945 time <http://ur1.ca/6ih>, so this can parallelize the job.
951 For configuring the public stream.
953 localonly: If set to true, only messages posted by users of this
954 service (rather than other services, filtered through OMB)
955 are shown in the public stream. Default true.
956 blacklist: An array of IDs of users to hide from the public stream.
957 Useful if you have someone making excessive Twitterfeed posts
958 to the site, other kinds of automated posts, testing bots, etc.
963 server: Like avatars, you can speed up page loading by pointing the
964 theme file lookup to another server (virtual or real). The
965 theme server's root path should map to the Laconica "theme"
966 subdirectory. Defaults to NULL.
971 For configuring the XMPP sub-system.
973 enabled: Whether to accept and send messages by XMPP. Default false.
974 server: server part of XMPP ID for update user.
975 port: connection port for clients. Default 5222, which you probably
976 shouldn't need to change.
977 user: username for the client connection. Users will receive messages
978 from 'user'@'server'.
979 resource: a unique identifier for the connection to the server. This
980 is actually used as a prefix for each XMPP component in the system.
981 password: password for the user account.
982 host: some XMPP domains are served by machines with a different
983 hostname. (For example, @gmail.com GTalk users connect to
984 talk.google.com). Set this to the correct hostname if that's the
985 case with your server.
986 encryption: Whether to encrypt the connection between Laconica and the
987 XMPP server. Defaults to true, but you can get
988 considerably better performance turning it off if you're
989 connecting to a server on the same machine or on a
991 debug: if turned on, this will make the XMPP library blurt out all of
992 the incoming and outgoing messages as XML stanzas. Use as a
993 last resort, and never turn it on if you don't have queues
994 enabled, since it will spit out sensitive data to the browser.
995 public: an array of JIDs to send _all_ notices to. This is useful for
996 participating in third-party search and archiving services.
1001 Miscellaneous tagging stuff.
1003 dropoff: Decay factor for tag listing, in seconds.
1004 Defaults to exponential decay over ten days; you can twiddle
1005 with it to try and get better results for your site.
1010 For daemon processes.
1012 piddir: directory that daemon processes should write their PID file
1013 (process ID) to. Defaults to /var/run/, which is where this
1014 stuff should usually go on Unix-ish systems.
1015 user: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective user ID
1016 to this user before running. Probably a good idea, especially if
1017 you start the daemons as root. Note: user name, like 'daemon',
1019 group: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective group ID
1020 to this named group. Again, a name, not a numerical ID.
1025 You can get a significant boost in performance by caching some
1026 database data in memcached <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>.
1028 enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
1029 server: a string with the hostname of the memcached server. Can also
1030 be an array of hostnames, if you've got more than one server.
1035 You can get a significant boost in performance using Sphinx Search
1036 instead of your database server to search for users and notices.
1037 <http://sphinxsearch.com/>.
1039 enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
1040 server: a string with the hostname of the sphinx server.
1041 port: an integer with the port number of the sphinx server.
1046 A catch-all for integration with other systems.
1048 source: The name to use for the source of posts to Twitter. Defaults
1049 to 'laconica', but if you request your own source name from
1050 Twitter <http://twitter.com/help/request_source>, you can use
1051 that here instead. Status updates on Twitter will then have
1059 enabled: A three-valued flag for whether to use notice inboxes (see
1060 upgrading info above for notes about this change). Can be
1061 'false', 'true', or '"transitional"'.
1066 For notice-posting throttles.
1068 enabled: Whether to throttle posting. Defaults to false.
1069 count: Each user can make this many posts in 'timespan' seconds. So, if count
1070 is 100 and timespan is 3600, then there can be only 100 posts
1071 from a user every hour.
1072 timespan: see 'count'.
1079 banned: an array of usernames and/or profile IDs of 'banned' profiles.
1080 The site will reject any notices by these users -- they will
1081 not be accepted at all. (Compare with blacklisted users above,
1082 whose posts just won't show up in the public stream.)
1087 The primary output for Laconica is syslog, unless you configured a
1088 separate logfile. This is probably the first place to look if you're
1089 getting weird behaviour from Laconica.
1091 If you're tracking the unstable version of Laconica in the git
1092 repository (see below), and you get a compilation error ("unexpected
1093 T_STRING") in the browser, check to see that you don't have any
1094 conflicts in your code.
1096 If you upgraded to Laconica 0.7.1 without reading the "Notice inboxes"
1097 section above, and all your users' 'Personal' tabs are empty, read the
1098 "Notice inboxes" section above.
1103 These are some myths you may see on the Web about Laconica.
1104 Documentation from the core team about Laconica has been pretty
1105 sparse, so some backtracking and guesswork resulted in some incorrect
1108 - "Set $config['db']['debug'] = 5 to debug the database." This is an
1109 extremely bad idea. It's a tool built into DB_DataObject that will
1110 emit oodles of print lines directly to the browser of your users.
1111 Among these lines will be your database username and password. Do
1112 not enable this option on a production Web site for any reason.
1114 - "Edit dataobject.ini with the following settings..." dataobject.ini
1115 is a development file for the DB_DataObject framework and is not
1116 used by the running software. It was removed from the Laconica
1117 distribution because its presence was confusing. Do not bother
1118 configuring dataobject.ini, and do not put your database username
1119 and password into the file on a production Web server; unscrupulous
1120 persons may try to read it to get your passwords.
1125 If you're adventurous or impatient, you may want to install the
1126 development version of Laconica. To get it, use the git version
1127 control tool <http://git-scm.com/> like so:
1129 git clone http://laconi.ca/software/laconica.git
1131 To keep it up-to-date, use 'git pull'. Watch for conflicts!
1136 There are several ways to get more information about Laconica.
1138 * There is a mailing list for Laconica developers and admins at
1139 http://mail.laconi.ca/mailman/listinfo/laconica-dev
1140 * The #laconica IRC channel on freenode.net <http://www.freenode.net/>.
1141 * The Laconica wiki, http://laconi.ca/trac/
1146 * Microblogging messages to http://identi.ca/evan are very welcome.
1147 * Laconica's Trac server has a bug tracker for any defects you may find,
1148 or ideas for making things better. http://laconi.ca/trac/
1149 * e-mail to evan@identi.ca will usually be read and responded to very
1150 quickly, unless the question is really hard.
1155 The following is an incomplete list of developers who've worked on
1156 Laconi.ca. Apologies for any oversight; please let evan@identi.ca know
1157 if anyone's been overlooked in error.
1159 * Evan Prodromou, founder and lead developer, Control Yourself, Inc.
1160 * Zach Copley, Control Yourself, Inc.
1161 * Earle Martin, Control Yourself, Inc.
1162 * Marie-Claude Doyon, designer, Control Yourself, Inc.
1163 * Sarven Capadisli, Control Yourself, Inc.
1164 * Robin Millette, Control Yourself, Inc.
1175 * Tryggvi Björgvinsson
1179 * Ken Sheppardson (Trac server, man-about-town)
1180 * Tiago 'gouki' Faria (i18n managerx)
1183 Thanks also to the developers of our upstream library code and to the
1184 thousands of people who have tried out Identi.ca, installed Laconi.ca,
1185 told their friends, and built the Open Microblogging network to what