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.
205 A design goal of Laconica is that the basic Web functionality should
206 work on even the most restrictive commercial hosting services.
207 However, additional functionality, such as receiving messages by
208 Jabber/GTalk, require that you be able to run long-running processes
209 on your account. In addition, posting by email or from SMS require
210 that you be able to install a mail filter in your mail server.
215 Installing the basic Laconica Web component is relatively easy,
216 especially if you've previously installed PHP/MySQL packages.
218 1. Unpack the tarball you downloaded on your Web server. Usually a
219 command like this will work:
221 tar zxf laconica-0.7.1.tar.gz
223 ...which will make a laconica-0.7.1 subdirectory in your current
224 directory. (If you don't have shell access on your Web server, you
225 may have to unpack the tarball on your local computer and FTP the
226 files to the server.)
228 2. Move the tarball to a directory of your choosing in your Web root
229 directory. Usually something like this will work:
231 mv laconica-0.7.1 /var/www/mublog
233 This will make your Laconica instance available in the mublog path of
234 your server, like "http://example.net/mublog". "microblog" or
235 "laconica" might also be good path names. If you know how to
236 configure virtual hosts on your web server, you can try setting up
237 "http://micro.example.net/" or the like.
239 3. Make your target directory writeable by the Web server.
241 chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/
243 On some systems, this will probably work:
245 chgrp www-data /var/www/mublog/
246 chmod g+w /var/www/mublog/
248 If your Web server runs as another user besides "www-data", try
249 that user's default group instead. As a last resort, you can create
250 a new group like "mublog" and add the Web server's user to the group.
252 4. You should also take this moment to make your avatar subdirectory
253 writeable by the Web server. An insecure way to do this is:
255 chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/avatar
257 You can also make the avatar directory writeable by the Web server
258 group, as noted above.
260 5. Create a database to hold your microblog data. Something like this
263 mysqladmin -u "username" --password="password" create laconica
265 Note that Laconica must have its own database; you can't share the
266 database with another program. You can name it whatever you want,
269 (If you don't have shell access to your server, you may need to use
270 a tool like PHPAdmin to create a database. Check your hosting
271 service's documentation for how to create a new MySQL database.)
273 6. Create a new database account that Laconica will use to access the
274 database. If you have shell access, this will probably work from the
277 GRANT ALL on laconica.*
278 TO 'lacuser'@'localhost'
279 IDENTIFIED BY 'lacpassword';
281 You should change 'lacuser' and 'lacpassword' to your preferred new
282 username and password. You may want to test logging in to MySQL as
285 7. In a browser, navigate to the Laconica install script; something like:
287 http://yourserver.example.com/mublog/install.php
289 Enter the database connection information and your site name. The
290 install program will configure your site and install the initial,
291 almost-empty database.
293 8. You should now be able to navigate to your microblog's main directory
294 and see the "Public Timeline", which will be empty. If not, magic
295 has happened! You can now register a new user, post some notices,
296 edit your profile, etc. However, you may want to wait to do that stuff
297 if you think you can set up "fancy URLs" (see below), since some
298 URLs are stored in the database.
303 By default, Laconica will use URLs that include the main PHP program's
304 name in them. For example, a user's home profile might be
307 http://example.org/mublog/index.php/mublog/fred
309 On certain systems that don't support this kind of syntax, they'll
312 http://example.org/mublog/index.php?p=mublog/fred
314 It's possible to configure the software so it looks like this instead:
316 http://example.org/mublog/fred
318 These "fancy URLs" are more readable and memorable for users. To use
319 fancy URLs, you must either have Apache 2.x with .htaccess enabled and
320 mod_redirect enabled, -OR- know how to configure "url redirection" in
323 1. Copy the htaccess.sample file to .htaccess in your Laconica
324 directory. Note: if you have control of your server's httpd.conf or
325 similar configuration files, it can greatly improve performance to
326 import the .htaccess file into your conf file instead. If you're
327 not sure how to do it, you may save yourself a lot of headache by
328 just leaving the .htaccess file.
330 2. Change the "RewriteBase" in the new .htaccess file to be the URL path
331 to your Laconica installation on your server. Typically this will
332 be the path to your Laconica directory relative to your Web root.
334 3. Add or uncomment or change a line in your config.php file so it says:
336 $config['site']['fancy'] = true;
338 You should now be able to navigate to a "fancy" URL on your server,
341 http://example.net/mublog/main/register
343 If you changed your HTTP server configuration, you may need to restart
349 To use a Sphinx server to search users and notices, you also need
350 to install, compile and enable the sphinx pecl extension for php on the
351 client side, which itself depends on the sphinx development files.
352 "pecl install sphinx" should take care of that. Add "extension=sphinx.so"
353 to your php.ini and reload apache to enable it.
355 You can update your MySQL or Postgresql databases to drop their fulltext
356 search indexes, since they're now provided by sphinx.
358 On the sphinx server side, a script reads the main database and build
359 the keyword index. A cron job reads the database and keeps the sphinx
360 indexes up to date. scripts/sphinx-cron.sh should be called by cron
361 every 5 minutes, for example. scripts/sphinx.sh is an init.d script
362 to start and stop the sphinx search daemon.
367 Laconica supports a cheap-and-dirty system for sending update messages
368 to mobile phones and for receiving updates from the mobile. Instead of
369 sending through the SMS network itself, which is costly and requires
370 buy-in from the wireless carriers, it simply piggybacks on the email
371 gateways that many carriers provide to their customers. So, SMS
372 configuration is essentially email configuration.
374 Each user sends to a made-up email address, which they keep a secret.
375 Incoming email that is "From" the user's SMS email address, and "To"
376 the users' secret email address on the site's domain, will be
377 converted to a notice and stored in the DB.
379 For this to work, there *must* be a domain or sub-domain for which all
380 (or most) incoming email can pass through the incoming mail filter.
382 1. Run the SQL script carrier.sql in your Laconica database. This will
385 mysql -u "lacuser" --password="lacpassword" laconica < db/carrier.sql
387 This will populate your database with a list of wireless carriers
388 that support email SMS gateways.
390 2. Make sure the maildaemon.php file is executable:
392 chmod +x scripts/maildaemon.php
394 Note that "daemon" is kind of a misnomer here; the script is more
395 of a filter than a daemon.
397 2. Edit /etc/aliases on your mail server and add the following line:
399 *: /path/to/laconica/scripts/maildaemon.php
401 3. Run whatever code you need to to update your aliases database. For
402 many mail servers (Postfix, Exim, Sendmail), this should work:
406 You may need to restart your mail server for the new database to
409 4. Set the following in your config.php file:
411 $config['mail']['domain'] = 'yourdomain.example.net';
413 At this point, post-by-email and post-by-SMS-gateway should work. Note
414 that if your mail server is on a different computer from your email
415 server, you'll need to have a full installation of Laconica, a working
416 config.php, and access to the Laconica database from the mail server.
421 XMPP (eXtended Message and Presence Protocol, <http://xmpp.org/>) is the
422 instant-messenger protocol that drives Jabber and GTalk IM. You can
423 distribute messages via XMPP using the system below; however, you
424 need to run the XMPP incoming daemon to allow incoming messages as
427 1. You may want to strongly consider setting up your own XMPP server.
428 Ejabberd, OpenFire, and JabberD are all Open Source servers.
429 Jabber, Inc. provides a high-performance commercial server.
431 2. You must register a Jabber ID (JID) with your new server. It helps
432 to choose a name like "update@example.com" or "notice" or something
433 similar. Alternately, your "update JID" can be registered on a
434 publicly-available XMPP service, like jabber.org or GTalk.
436 Laconica will not register the JID with your chosen XMPP server;
437 you need to do this manually, with an XMPP client like Gajim,
438 Telepathy, or Pidgin.im.
440 3. Configure your site's XMPP variables, as described below in the
441 configuration section.
443 On a default installation, your site can broadcast messages using
444 XMPP. Users won't be able to post messages using XMPP unless you've
445 got the XMPP daemon running. See 'Queues and daemons' below for how
446 to set that up. Also, once you have a sizable number of users, sending
447 a lot of SMS, OMB, and XMPP messages whenever someone posts a message
448 can really slow down your site; it may cause posting to timeout.
450 NOTE: stream_select(), a crucial function for network programming, is
451 broken on PHP 5.2.x less than 5.2.6 on amd64-based servers. We don't
452 work around this bug in Laconica; current recommendation is to move
453 off of amd64 to another server.
458 You can send *all* messages from your microblogging site to a
459 third-party service using XMPP. This can be useful for providing
460 search, indexing, bridging, or other cool services.
462 To configure a downstream site to receive your public stream, add
463 their "JID" (Jabber ID) to your config.php as follows:
465 $config['xmpp']['public'][] = 'downstream@example.net';
467 (Don't miss those square brackets at the end.) Note that your XMPP
468 broadcasting must be configured as mentioned above. Although you can
469 send out messages at "Web time", high-volume sites should strongly
470 consider setting up queues and daemons.
475 Some activities that Laconica needs to do, like broadcast OMB, SMS,
476 and XMPP messages, can be 'queued' and done by off-line bots instead.
477 For this to work, you must be able to run long-running offline
478 processes, either on your main Web server or on another server you
479 control. (Your other server will still need all the above
480 prerequisites, with the exception of Apache.) Installing on a separate
481 server is probably a good idea for high-volume sites.
483 1. You'll need the "CLI" (command-line interface) version of PHP
484 installed on whatever server you use.
486 2. If you're using a separate server for queues, install Laconica
487 somewhere on the server. You don't need to worry about the
488 .htaccess file, but make sure that your config.php file is close
489 to, or identical to, your Web server's version.
491 3. In your config.php files (both the Web server and the queues
492 server!), set the following variable:
494 $config['queue']['enabled'] = true;
496 You may also want to look at the 'daemon' section of this file for
497 more daemon options. Note that if you set the 'user' and/or 'group'
498 options, you'll need to create that user and/or group by hand.
499 They're not created automatically.
501 4. On the queues server, run the command scripts/startdaemons.sh. It
502 needs as a parameter the install path; if you run it from the
503 Laconica dir, "." should suffice.
505 This will run eight (for now) queue handlers:
507 * xmppdaemon.php - listens for new XMPP messages from users and stores
508 them as notices in the database.
509 * jabberqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
510 registered users who should receive them.
511 * publicqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
512 public feed listeners.
513 * ombqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to OpenMicroBlogging
514 recipients on foreign servers.
515 * smsqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to SMS-over-email addresses
517 * xmppconfirmhandler.php - sends confirmation messages to registered
519 * twitterqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to Twitter for user
520 who have opted to set up Twitter bridging.
521 * facebookqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to Facebook for users
522 of the built-in Facebook application.
524 Note that these queue daemons are pretty raw, and need your care. In
525 particular, they leak memory, and you may want to restart them on a
526 regular (daily or so) basis with a cron job. Also, if they lose
527 the connection to the XMPP server for too long, they'll simply die. It
528 may be a good idea to use a daemon-monitoring service, like 'monit',
529 to check their status and keep them running.
531 All the daemons write their process IDs (pids) to /var/run/ by
532 default. This can be useful for starting, stopping, and monitoring the
535 Twitter Friends Syncing
536 -----------------------
538 As of Laconica 0.6.3, users may set a flag in their settings ("Subscribe
539 to my Twitter friends here" under the Twitter tab) to have Laconica
540 attempt to locate and subscribe to "friends" (people they "follow") on
541 Twitter who also have accounts on your Laconica system, and who have
542 previously set up a link for automatically posting notices to Twitter.
544 Optionally, there is a script (./scripts/synctwitterfriends.php), meant
545 to be run periodically from a job scheduler (e.g.: cron under Unix), to
546 look for new additions to users' friends lists. Note that the friends
547 syncing only subscribes users to each other, it does not unsubscribe
548 users when they stop following each other on Twitter.
552 # Update Twitter friends subscriptions every half hour
553 0,30 * * * * /path/to/php /path/to/laconica/scripts/synctwitterfriends.php>&/dev/null
555 Built-in Facebook Application
556 -----------------------------
558 Laconica's Facebook application allows your users to automatically
559 update their Facebook statuses with their latest notices, invite
560 their friends to use the app (and thus your site), view their notice
561 timelines, and post notices -- all from within Facebook. The application
562 is built into Laconica and runs on your host. For automatic Facebook
563 status updating to work you will need to enable queuing and run the
564 facebookqueuehandler.php daemon (see the "Queues and daemons" section
567 Quick setup instructions*:
569 Install the Facebook Developer application on Facebook:
571 http://www.facebook.com/developers/
573 Use it to create a new application and generate an API key and secret.
574 Uncomment the Facebook app section of your config.php and copy in the
575 key and secret, e.g.:
577 # Config section for the built-in Facebook application
578 $config['facebook']['apikey'] = 'APIKEY';
579 $config['facebook']['secret'] = 'SECRET';
581 In Facebook's application editor, specify the following URLs for your app:
583 - Callback URL: http://example.net/mublog/facebook/
584 - Post-Remove URL: http://example.net/mublog/facebook/remove
585 - Post-Add Redirect URL: http://apps.facebook.com/yourapp/
586 - Canvas URL: http://apps.facebook.com/yourapp/
588 (Replace 'example.net' with your host's URL, 'mublog' with the path
589 to your Laconica installation, and 'yourapp' with the name of the
590 Facebook application you created.)
592 Additionally, Choose "Web" for Application type in the Advanced tab.
593 In the "Canvas setting" section, choose the "FBML" for Render Method,
594 "Smart Size" for IFrame size, and "Full width (760px)" for Canvas Width.
595 Everything else can be left with default values.
597 *For more detailed instructions please see the installation guide on the
600 http://laconi.ca/trac/wiki/FacebookApplication
605 Sitemap files <http://sitemaps.org/> are a very nice way of telling
606 search engines and other interested bots what's available on your site
607 and what's changed recently. You can generate sitemap files for your
610 1. Choose your sitemap URL layout. Laconica creates a number of
611 sitemap XML files for different parts of your site. You may want to
612 put these in a sub-directory of your Laconica directory to avoid
613 clutter. The sitemap index file tells the search engines and other
614 bots where to find all the sitemap files; it *must* be in the main
615 installation directory or higher. Both types of file must be
616 available through HTTP.
618 2. To generate your sitemaps, run the following command on your server:
620 php scripts/sitemap.php -f index-file-path -d sitemap-directory -u URL-prefix-for-sitemaps
622 Here, index-file-path is the full path to the sitemap index file,
623 like './sitemapindex.xml'. sitemap-directory is the directory where
624 you want the sitemaps stored, like './sitemaps/' (make sure the dir
625 exists). URL-prefix-for-sitemaps is the full URL for the sitemap dir,
626 typically something like <http://example.net/mublog/sitemaps/>.
628 You can use several methods for submitting your sitemap index to
629 search engines to get your site indexed. One is to add a line like the
630 following to your robots.txt file:
632 Sitemap: /mublog/sitemapindex.xml
634 This is a good idea for letting *all* Web spiders know about your
635 sitemap. You can also submit sitemap files to major search engines
636 using their respective "Webmaster centres"; see sitemaps.org for links
642 There are two themes shipped with this version of Laconica: "identica",
643 which is what the Identi.ca site uses, and "default", which is a good
644 basis for other sites.
646 As of right now, your ability to change the theme is site-wide; users
647 can't choose their own theme. Additionally, the only thing you can
648 change in the theme is CSS stylesheets and some image files; you can't
649 change the HTML output, like adding or removing menu items.
651 You can choose a theme using the $config['site']['theme'] element in
652 the config.php file. See below for details.
654 You can add your own theme by making a sub-directory of the 'theme'
655 subdirectory with the name of your theme. Each theme can have the
658 display.css: a CSS2 file for "default" styling for all browsers.
659 ie6.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
661 ie7.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
663 logo.png: a logo image for the site.
664 default-avatar-profile.png: a 96x96 pixel image to use as the avatar for
665 users who don't upload their own.
666 default-avatar-stream.png: Ditto, but 48x48. For streams of notices.
667 default-avatar-mini.png: Ditto ditto, but 24x24. For subscriptions
668 listing on profile pages.
670 You may want to start by copying the files from the default theme to
673 NOTE: the HTML generated by Laconica changed *radically* between
674 version 0.6.x and 0.7.x. Older themes will need signification
675 modification to use the new output format.
680 Translations in Laconica use the gettext system <http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/>.
681 Theoretically, you can add your own sub-directory to the locale/
682 subdirectory to add a new language to your system. You'll need to
683 compile the ".po" files into ".mo" files, however.
685 Contributions of translation information to Laconica are very easy:
686 you can use the Web interface at http://laconi.ca/pootle/ to add one
687 or a few or lots of new translations -- or even new languages. You can
688 also download more up-to-date .po files there, if you so desire.
693 There is no built-in system for doing backups in Laconica. You can make
694 backups of a working Laconica system by backing up the database and
695 the Web directory. To backup the database use mysqldump <http://ur1.ca/7xo>
696 and to backup the Web directory, try tar.
701 The administrator can set the "private" flag for a site so that it's
702 not visible to non-logged-in users. This might be useful for
703 workgroups who want to share a microblogging site for project
704 management, but host it on a public server.
706 Note that this is an experimental feature; total privacy is not
707 guaranteed or ensured. Also, privacy is all-or-nothing for a site; you
708 can't have some accounts or notices private, and others public.
709 Finally, the interaction of private sites with OpenMicroBlogging is
710 undefined. Remote users won't be able to subscribe to users on a
711 private site, but users of the private site may be able to subscribe
712 to users on a remote site. (Or not... it's not well tested.) The
713 "proper behaviour" hasn't been defined here, so handle with care.
718 If you've been using Laconica 0.6, 0.5 or lower, or if you've been
719 tracking the "git" version of the software, you will probably want
720 to upgrade and keep your existing data. There is no automated upgrade
721 procedure in Laconica 0.7.1. Try these step-by-step instructions; read
722 to the end first before trying them.
724 0. Download Laconica and set up all the prerequisites as if you were
726 1. Make backups of both your database and your Web directory. UNDER NO
727 CIRCUMSTANCES should you try to do an upgrade without a known-good
728 backup. You have been warned.
729 2. Shut down Web access to your site, either by turning off your Web
730 server or by redirecting all pages to a "sorry, under maintenance"
732 3. Shut down XMPP access to your site, typically by shutting down the
733 xmppdaemon.php process and all other daemons that you're running.
734 If you've got "monit" or "cron" automatically restarting your
735 daemons, make sure to turn that off, too.
736 4. Shut down SMS and email access to your site. The easy way to do
737 this is to comment out the line piping incoming email to your
738 maildaemon.php file, and running something like "newaliases".
739 5. Once all writing processes to your site are turned off, make a
740 final backup of the Web directory and database.
741 6. Move your Laconica directory to a backup spot, like "mublog.bak".
742 7. Unpack your Laconica 0.6 tarball and move it to "mublog" or
743 wherever your code used to be.
744 8. Copy the config.php file and avatar directory from your old
745 directory to your new directory.
746 9. Copy htaccess.sample to .htaccess in the new directory. Change the
747 RewriteBase to use the correct path.
748 10. Rebuild the database. Go to your Laconica directory and run the
749 rebuilddb.sh script like this:
751 ./scripts/rebuilddb.sh rootuser rootpassword database db/laconica.sql
753 Here, rootuser and rootpassword are the username and password for a
754 user who can drop and create databases as well as tables; typically
755 that's _not_ the user Laconica runs as.
756 11. Use mysql client to log into your database and make sure that the
757 notice, user, profile, subscription etc. tables are non-empty.
758 12. Turn back on the Web server, and check that things still work.
759 13. Turn back on XMPP bots and email maildaemon. Note that the XMPP
760 bots have changed since version 0.5; see above for details.
762 If you're upgrading from very old versions, you may want to look at
763 the fixup_* scripts in the scripts directories. These will store some
764 precooked data in the DB. All upgraders should check out the inboxes
767 NOTE: the database definition file, stoica.ini, has been renamed to
768 laconica.ini (since this is the recommended database name). If you
769 have a line in your config.php pointing to the old name, you'll need
775 Before version 0.6.2, the page showing all notices from people the
776 user is subscribed to ("so-and-so with friends") was calculated at run
777 time. Starting with 0.6.2, we have a new data structure for holding a
778 user's "notice inbox". (Note: distinct from the "message inbox", which
779 is the "inbox" tab in the UI. The notice inbox appears under the
782 Notices are added to the inbox when they're created. This speeds up
783 the query considerably, and also allows us the opportunity, in the
784 future, to add different kind of notices to an inbox -- like @-replies
785 or subscriptions to search terms or hashtags.
787 Notice inboxes are enabled by default for new installations. If you
788 are upgrading an existing site, this means that your users will see
789 empty "Personal" pages. The following steps will help you fix the
792 0. $config['inboxes']['enabled'] can be set to one of three values. If
793 you set it to 'false', the site will work as before. Support for this
794 will probably be dropped in future versions.
795 1. Setting the flag to 'transitional' means that you're in transition.
796 In this mode, the code will run the "new query" or the "old query"
797 based on whether the user's inbox has been updated.
798 2. After setting the flag to "transitional", you can run the
799 fixup_inboxes.php script to create the inboxes. You may want to set
800 the memory limit high. You can re-run it without ill effect.
801 3. When fixup_inboxes is finished, you can set the enabled flag to
804 Configuration options
805 =====================
807 The sole configuration file for Laconica (excepting configurations for
808 dependency software) is config.php in your Laconica directory. If you
809 edit any other file in the directory, like lib/common.php (where most
810 of the defaults are defined), you will lose your configuration options
811 in any upgrade, and you will wish that you had been more careful.
813 Starting with version 0.7.1, you can put config files in the
814 /etc/laconica/ directory on your server, if it exists. Config files
815 will be included in this order:
817 * /etc/laconica/laconica.php - server-wide config
818 * /etc/laconica/<servername>.php - for a virtual host
819 * /etc/laconica/<servername>_<pathname>.php - for a path
820 * INSTALLDIR/config.php - for a particular implementation
822 Almost all configuration options are made through a two-dimensional
823 associative array, cleverly named $config. A typical configuration
826 $config['section']['option'] = value;
828 For brevity, the following documentation describes each section and
834 This section is a catch-all for site-wide variables.
836 name: the name of your site, like 'YourCompany Microblog'.
837 server: the server part of your site's URLs, like 'example.net'.
838 path: The path part of your site's URLs, like 'mublog' or '/'
840 fancy: whether or not your site uses fancy URLs (see Fancy URLs
841 section above). Default is false.
842 logfile: full path to a file for Laconica to save logging
843 information to. You may want to use this if you don't have
845 locale_path: full path to the directory for locale data. Unless you
846 store all your locale data in one place, you probably
847 don't need to use this.
848 language: default language for your site. Defaults to US English.
849 languages: A list of languages supported on your site. Typically you'd
850 only change this if you wanted to disable support for one
852 "unset($config['site']['languages']['de'])" will disable
854 theme: Theme for your site (see Theme section). Two themes are
855 provided by default: 'default' and 'stoica' (the one used by
856 Identi.ca). It's appreciated if you don't use the 'stoica' theme
857 except as the basis for your own.
858 email: contact email address for your site. By default, it's extracted
859 from your Web server environment; you may want to customize it.
860 broughtbyurl: name of an organization or individual who provides the
861 service. Each page will include a link to this name in the
862 footer. A good way to link to the blog, forum, wiki,
863 corporate portal, or whoever is making the service available.
864 broughtby: text used for the "brought by" link.
865 timezone: default timezone for message display. Users can set their
866 own time zone. Defaults to 'UTC', which is a pretty good default.
867 closed: If set to 'true', will disallow registration on your site.
868 This is a cheap way to restrict accounts to only one
869 individual or group; just register the accounts you want on
870 the service, *then* set this variable to 'true'.
871 inviteonly: If set to 'true', will only allow registration if the user
872 was invited by an existing user.
873 private: If set to 'true', anonymous users will be redirected to the
874 'login' page. Also, API methods that normally require no
875 authentication will require it. Note that this does not turn
876 off registration; use 'closed' or 'inviteonly' for the
878 notice: A plain string that will appear on every page. A good place
879 to put introductory information about your service, or info about
880 upgrades and outages, or other community info. Any HTML will
886 This section is a reference to the configuration options for
887 DB_DataObject (see <http://ur1.ca/7xp>). The ones that you may want to
888 set are listed below for clarity.
890 database: a DSN (Data Source Name) for your Laconica database. This is
891 in the format 'protocol://username:password@hostname/databasename',
892 where 'protocol' is 'mysql' or 'mysqli' (or possibly 'postgresql', if you
893 really know what you're doing), 'username' is the username,
894 'password' is the password, and etc.
895 ini_yourdbname: if your database is not named 'laconica', you'll need
896 to set this to point to the location of the
897 laconica.ini file. Note that the real name of your database
898 should go in there, not literally 'yourdbname'.
899 db_driver: You can try changing this to 'MDB2' to use the other driver
900 type for DB_DataObject, but note that it breaks the OpenID
901 libraries, which only support PEAR::DB.
902 debug: On a database error, you may get a message saying to set this
903 value to 5 to see debug messages in the browser. This breaks
904 just about all pages, and will also expose the username and
906 quote_identifiers: Set this to true if you're using postgresql.
907 type: either 'mysql' or 'postgresql' (used for some bits of
908 database-type-specific SQL in the code). Defaults to mysql.
909 mirror: you can set this to an array of DSNs, like the above
910 'database' value. If it's set, certain read-only actions will
911 use a random value out of this array for the database, rather
912 than the one in 'database' (actually, 'database' is overwritten).
913 You can offload a busy DB server by setting up MySQL replication
914 and adding the slaves to this array. Note that if you want some
915 requests to go to the 'database' (master) server, you'll need
916 to include it in this array, too.
921 By default, Laconica sites log error messages to the syslog facility.
922 (You can override this using the 'logfile' parameter described above).
924 appname: The name that Laconica uses to log messages. By default it's
925 "laconica", but if you have more than one installation on the
926 server, you may want to change the name for each instance so
927 you can track log messages more easily.
932 You can configure the software to queue time-consuming tasks, like
933 sending out SMS email or XMPP messages, for off-line processing. See
934 'Queues and daemons' above for how to set this up.
936 enabled: Whether to uses queues. Defaults to false.
941 The default license to use for your users notices. The default is the
942 Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which is probably the right
943 choice for any public site. Note that some other servers will not
944 accept notices if you apply a stricter license than this.
946 url: URL of the license, used for links.
947 title: Title for the license, like 'Creative Commons Attribution 3.0'.
948 image: A button shown on each page for the license.
953 This is for configuring out-going email. We use PEAR's Mail module,
954 see: http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.mail.mail.factory.php
956 backend: the backend to use for mail, one of 'mail', 'sendmail', and
957 'smtp'. Defaults to PEAR's default, 'mail'.
958 params: if the mail backend requires any parameters, you can provide
959 them in an associative array.
964 This is for configuring nicknames in the service.
966 blacklist: an array of strings for usernames that may not be
967 registered. A default array exists for strings that are
968 used by Laconica (e.g. 'doc', 'main', 'avatar', 'theme')
969 but you may want to add others if you have other software
970 installed in a subdirectory of Laconica or if you just
971 don't want certain words used as usernames.
972 featured: an array of nicknames of 'featured' users of the site.
973 Can be useful to draw attention to well-known users, or
974 interesting people, or whatever.
979 For configuring avatar access.
981 server: If set, defines another server where avatars are stored in the
982 root directory. Note that the 'avatar' subdir still has to be
983 writeable. You'd typically use this to split HTTP requests on
984 the client to speed up page loading, either with another
985 virtual server or with an NFS or SAMBA share. Clients
986 typically only make 2 connections to a single server at a
987 time <http://ur1.ca/6ih>, so this can parallelize the job.
993 For configuring the public stream.
995 localonly: If set to true, only messages posted by users of this
996 service (rather than other services, filtered through OMB)
997 are shown in the public stream. Default true.
998 blacklist: An array of IDs of users to hide from the public stream.
999 Useful if you have someone making excessive Twitterfeed posts
1000 to the site, other kinds of automated posts, testing bots, etc.
1005 server: Like avatars, you can speed up page loading by pointing the
1006 theme file lookup to another server (virtual or real). The
1007 theme server's root path should map to the Laconica "theme"
1008 subdirectory. Defaults to NULL.
1013 For configuring the XMPP sub-system.
1015 enabled: Whether to accept and send messages by XMPP. Default false.
1016 server: server part of XMPP ID for update user.
1017 port: connection port for clients. Default 5222, which you probably
1018 shouldn't need to change.
1019 user: username for the client connection. Users will receive messages
1020 from 'user'@'server'.
1021 resource: a unique identifier for the connection to the server. This
1022 is actually used as a prefix for each XMPP component in the system.
1023 password: password for the user account.
1024 host: some XMPP domains are served by machines with a different
1025 hostname. (For example, @gmail.com GTalk users connect to
1026 talk.google.com). Set this to the correct hostname if that's the
1027 case with your server.
1028 encryption: Whether to encrypt the connection between Laconica and the
1029 XMPP server. Defaults to true, but you can get
1030 considerably better performance turning it off if you're
1031 connecting to a server on the same machine or on a
1033 debug: if turned on, this will make the XMPP library blurt out all of
1034 the incoming and outgoing messages as XML stanzas. Use as a
1035 last resort, and never turn it on if you don't have queues
1036 enabled, since it will spit out sensitive data to the browser.
1037 public: an array of JIDs to send _all_ notices to. This is useful for
1038 participating in third-party search and archiving services.
1043 Miscellaneous tagging stuff.
1045 dropoff: Decay factor for tag listing, in seconds.
1046 Defaults to exponential decay over ten days; you can twiddle
1047 with it to try and get better results for your site.
1052 For daemon processes.
1054 piddir: directory that daemon processes should write their PID file
1055 (process ID) to. Defaults to /var/run/, which is where this
1056 stuff should usually go on Unix-ish systems.
1057 user: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective user ID
1058 to this user before running. Probably a good idea, especially if
1059 you start the daemons as root. Note: user name, like 'daemon',
1061 group: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective group ID
1062 to this named group. Again, a name, not a numerical ID.
1067 You can get a significant boost in performance by caching some
1068 database data in memcached <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>.
1070 enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
1071 server: a string with the hostname of the memcached server. Can also
1072 be an array of hostnames, if you've got more than one server.
1077 You can get a significant boost in performance using Sphinx Search
1078 instead of your database server to search for users and notices.
1079 <http://sphinxsearch.com/>.
1081 enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
1082 server: a string with the hostname of the sphinx server.
1083 port: an integer with the port number of the sphinx server.
1088 A catch-all for integration with other systems.
1090 source: The name to use for the source of posts to Twitter. Defaults
1091 to 'laconica', but if you request your own source name from
1092 Twitter <http://twitter.com/help/request_source>, you can use
1093 that here instead. Status updates on Twitter will then have
1101 enabled: A three-valued flag for whether to use notice inboxes (see
1102 upgrading info above for notes about this change). Can be
1103 'false', 'true', or '"transitional"'.
1108 For notice-posting throttles.
1110 enabled: Whether to throttle posting. Defaults to false.
1111 count: Each user can make this many posts in 'timespan' seconds. So, if count
1112 is 100 and timespan is 3600, then there can be only 100 posts
1113 from a user every hour.
1114 timespan: see 'count'.
1121 banned: an array of usernames and/or profile IDs of 'banned' profiles.
1122 The site will reject any notices by these users -- they will
1123 not be accepted at all. (Compare with blacklisted users above,
1124 whose posts just won't show up in the public stream.)
1129 The primary output for Laconica is syslog, unless you configured a
1130 separate logfile. This is probably the first place to look if you're
1131 getting weird behaviour from Laconica.
1133 If you're tracking the unstable version of Laconica in the git
1134 repository (see below), and you get a compilation error ("unexpected
1135 T_STRING") in the browser, check to see that you don't have any
1136 conflicts in your code.
1138 If you upgraded to Laconica 0.7.1 without reading the "Notice inboxes"
1139 section above, and all your users' 'Personal' tabs are empty, read the
1140 "Notice inboxes" section above.
1145 These are some myths you may see on the Web about Laconica.
1146 Documentation from the core team about Laconica has been pretty
1147 sparse, so some backtracking and guesswork resulted in some incorrect
1150 - "Set $config['db']['debug'] = 5 to debug the database." This is an
1151 extremely bad idea. It's a tool built into DB_DataObject that will
1152 emit oodles of print lines directly to the browser of your users.
1153 Among these lines will be your database username and password. Do
1154 not enable this option on a production Web site for any reason.
1156 - "Edit dataobject.ini with the following settings..." dataobject.ini
1157 is a development file for the DB_DataObject framework and is not
1158 used by the running software. It was removed from the Laconica
1159 distribution because its presence was confusing. Do not bother
1160 configuring dataobject.ini, and do not put your database username
1161 and password into the file on a production Web server; unscrupulous
1162 persons may try to read it to get your passwords.
1167 If you're adventurous or impatient, you may want to install the
1168 development version of Laconica. To get it, use the git version
1169 control tool <http://git-scm.com/> like so:
1171 git clone http://laconi.ca/software/laconica.git
1173 To keep it up-to-date, use 'git pull'. Watch for conflicts!
1178 There are several ways to get more information about Laconica.
1180 * There is a mailing list for Laconica developers and admins at
1181 http://mail.laconi.ca/mailman/listinfo/laconica-dev
1182 * The #laconica IRC channel on freenode.net <http://www.freenode.net/>.
1183 * The Laconica wiki, http://laconi.ca/trac/
1188 * Microblogging messages to http://identi.ca/evan are very welcome.
1189 * Laconica's Trac server has a bug tracker for any defects you may find,
1190 or ideas for making things better. http://laconi.ca/trac/
1191 * e-mail to evan@identi.ca will usually be read and responded to very
1192 quickly, unless the question is really hard.
1197 The following is an incomplete list of developers who've worked on
1198 Laconi.ca. Apologies for any oversight; please let evan@identi.ca know
1199 if anyone's been overlooked in error.
1201 * Evan Prodromou, founder and lead developer, Control Yourself, Inc.
1202 * Zach Copley, Control Yourself, Inc.
1203 * Earle Martin, Control Yourself, Inc.
1204 * Marie-Claude Doyon, designer, Control Yourself, Inc.
1205 * Sarven Capadisli, Control Yourself, Inc.
1206 * Robin Millette, Control Yourself, Inc.
1217 * Tryggvi Björgvinsson
1221 * Ken Sheppardson (Trac server, man-about-town)
1222 * Tiago 'gouki' Faria (i18n managerx)
1225 Thanks also to the developers of our upstream library code and to the
1226 thousands of people who have tried out Identi.ca, installed Laconi.ca,
1227 told their friends, and built the Open Microblogging network to what