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, Pownce 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 1.0:
38 http://www.openknowledge.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 feature and security improvement version from version
75 0.6.1 (release 6 Oct 2008). Notable features of version 0.6.2 include:
77 - Notice inboxes have been added. This is a big database change
78 that will allow a more robust messaging model in the future; for
79 now, it is an optimization that speeds up some queries.
80 - Posted URLs are automatically shortened; users can choose their
81 preferred url shortening service.
82 - Support SUP protocol
83 (http://code.google.com/p/simpleupdateprotocol/) for quicker updates
84 to FriendFeed (http://friendfeed.com/).
85 - Tag streams now have an RSS feed.
86 - CSRF protection for posting notices and logging in. This closes
87 the "Version 0 API" used initially for identi.ca and supported
88 until September 30, 2008.
89 - Slightly broadened the layout of default and Identi.ca themes to
90 accommodate more verbose (non-English!) languages' interfaces.
91 - Replies made through the Web site will refer to the clicked-on
93 - enjit queue handler.
94 - Experimental theme for iphone use.
95 - Various internationalization scripts and updates.
96 - Better UTF-8 escaped entity handling in API.
97 - Better handling of since_id and before_id parameters in API.
98 - Better heuristics for when to include a closing parenthesis in a link.
99 - Handle multi-byte-encoded @-replies from XMPP through Twitter bridge.
100 - Better handling of read-only requests in API, to allow using
101 replicated mirror servers.
102 - A lot of common code factored out of default and identi.ca themes;
103 default theme now much more functional.
104 - 'Invite-only' mode for closed sites.
105 - Some undocumented features in Twitter API user/show.
106 - Favorites flag in API for statuses.
108 Because of the CSRF fixes in particular, this upgrade is recommended
109 for all Laconica sites.
114 The following software packages are *required* for this software to
117 - PHP 5.2.x. It may be possible to run this software on earlier
118 versions of PHP, but many of the functions used are only available
120 - MySQL 5.x. The Laconica database is stored, by default, in a MySQL
121 server. It has been primarily tested on 5.x servers, although it may
122 be possible to install on earlier (or later!) versions. The server
123 *must* support the MyISAM storage engine -- the default for most
124 MySQL servers -- *and* the InnoDB storage engine.
125 - A Web server. Preferably, you should have Apache 2.2.x with the
126 mod_rewrite extension installed and enabled.
128 Your PHP installation must include the following PHP extensions:
130 - Curl. This is for fetching files by HTTP.
131 - XMLWriter. This is for formatting XML and HTML output.
132 - MySQL. For accessing the database.
133 - GD. For scaling down avatar images.
134 - mbstring. For handling Unicode (UTF-8) encoded strings.
136 For some functionality, you will also need the following extensions:
138 - Memcache. A client for the memcached server, which caches database
139 information in volatile memory. This is important for adequate
140 performance on high-traffic sites. You will also need a memcached
141 server to store the data in.
142 - Mailparse. Efficient parsing of email requires this extension.
143 Submission by email or SMS-over-email uses this extension.
145 You will almost definitely get 2-3 times better performance from your
146 site if you install a PHP bytecode cache/accelerator. Some well-known
147 examples are: eaccelerator, Turck mmcache, xcache, apc. Zend Optimizer
148 is a proprietary accelerator installed on some hosting sites.
153 A number of external PHP libraries are used to provide basic
154 functionality and optional functionality for your system. For your
155 convenience, they are available in the "extlib" directory of this
156 package, and you do not have to download and install them. However,
157 you may want to keep them up-to-date with the latest upstream version,
158 and the URLs are listed here for your convenience.
160 - DB_DataObject http://pear.php.net/package/DB_DataObject
161 - Validate http://pear.php.net/package/Validate
162 - OpenID from OpenIDEnabled (not the PEAR version!). We decided
163 to use the openidenabled.com version since it's more widely
164 implemented, and seems to be better supported.
165 http://openidenabled.com/php-openid/
166 - PEAR DB. Although this is an older data access system (new
167 packages should probably use PHP DBO), the OpenID libraries
168 depend on PEAR DB so we use it here, too. DB_DataObject can
169 also use PEAR MDB2, which may give you better performance
170 but won't work with OpenID.
171 http://pear.php.net/package/DB
172 - OAuth.php from http://oauth.googlecode.com/svn/code/php/
173 - markdown.php from http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/
174 - PEAR Mail, for sending out mail notifications
175 http://pear.php.net/package/Mail
176 - PEAR Net_SMTP, if you use the SMTP factory for notifications
177 http://pear.php.net/package/Net_SMTP
178 - PEAR Net_Socket, if you use the SMTP factory for notifications
179 http://pear.php.net/package/Net_Socket
180 - XMPPHP, the follow-up to Class.Jabber.php. Probably the best XMPP
181 library available for PHP. http://xmpphp.googlecode.com/. Note that
182 as of this writing the version of this library that is available in
183 the extlib directory is *significantly different* from the upstream
184 version (patches have been submitted). Upgrading to the upstream
185 version may render your Laconica site unable to send or receive XMPP
188 A design goal of Laconica is that the basic Web functionality should
189 work on even the most restrictive commercial hosting services.
190 However, additional functionality, such as receiving messages by
191 Jabber/GTalk, require that you be able to run long-running processes
192 on your account. In addition, posting by email or from SMS require
193 that you be able to install a mail filter in your mail server.
198 Installing the basic Laconica Web component is relatively easy,
199 especially if you've previously installed PHP/MySQL packages.
201 1. Unpack the tarball you downloaded on your Web server. Usually a
202 command like this will work:
204 tar zxf laconica-0.6.2.tar.gz
206 ...which will make a laconica-0.6.2 subdirectory in your current
207 directory. (If you don't have shell access on your Web server, you
208 may have to unpack the tarball on your local computer and FTP the
209 files to the server.)
211 2. Move the tarball to a directory of your choosing in your Web root
212 directory. Usually something like this will work:
214 mv laconica-0.6.2 /var/www/mublog
216 This will make your Laconica instance available in the mublog path of
217 your server, like "http://example.net/mublog". "microblog" or
218 "laconica" might also be good path names. If you know how to
219 configure virtual hosts on your web server, you can try setting up
220 "http://micro.example.net/" or the like.
222 3. You should also take this moment to make your avatar subdirectory
223 writeable by the Web server. An insecure way to do this is:
225 chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/avatar
227 On some systems, this will probably work:
229 chgrp www-data /var/www/mublog/avatar
230 chmod g+w /var/www/mublog/avatar
232 If your Web server runs as another user besides "www-data", try
233 that user's default group instead. As a last resort, you can create
234 a new group like "avatar" and add the Web server's user to the group.
236 4. Create a database to hold your microblog data. Something like this
239 mysqladmin -u "username" --password="password" create laconica
241 Note that Laconica must have its own database; you can't share the
242 database with another program. You can name it whatever you want,
245 (If you don't have shell access to your server, you may need to use
246 a tool like PHPAdmin to create a database. Check your hosting
247 service's documentation for how to create a new MySQL database.)
249 5. Run the laconica.sql SQL script in the db subdirectory to create
250 the database tables in the database. A typical system would work
253 mysql -u "username" --password="password" laconica < /var/www/mublog/db/laconica.sql
255 You may want to test by logging into the database and checking that
256 the tables were created. Here's an example:
260 6. Create a new database account that Laconica will use to access the
261 database. If you have shell access, this will probably work from the
264 GRANT SELECT,INSERT,DELETE,UPDATE on laconica.*
265 TO 'lacuser'@'localhost'
266 IDENTIFIED BY 'lacpassword';
268 You should change 'lacuser' and 'lacpassword' to your preferred new
269 username and password. You may want to test logging in as this new
270 user and testing that you can SELECT from some of the tables in the
271 DB (use SHOW TABLES to see which ones are there).
273 7. Copy the config.php.sample in the Laconica directory to config.php.
275 8. Edit config.php to set the basic configuration for your system.
276 (See descriptions below for basic config options.) Note that there
277 are lots of options and if you try to do them all at once, you will
278 have a hard time making sure what's working and what's not. So,
279 stick with the basics at first. In particular, customizing the
280 'site' and 'db' settings will almost definitely be needed.
282 9. At this point, you should be able to navigate in a browser to your
283 microblog's main directory and see the "Public Timeline", which
284 will be empty. If not, magic has happened! You can now register a
285 new user, post some notices, edit your profile, etc. However, you
286 may want to wait to do that stuff if you think you can set up
287 "fancy URLs" (see below), since some URLs are stored in the database.
292 By default, Laconica will have big long sloppy URLs that are hard for
293 people to remember or use. For example, a user's home profile might be
296 http://example.org/mublog/index.php?action=showstream&nickname=fred
298 It's possible to configure the software so it looks like this instead:
300 http://example.org/mublog/fred
302 These "fancy URLs" are more readable and memorable for users. To use
303 fancy URLs, you must either have Apache 2.2.x with .htaccess enabled
304 and mod_redirect enabled, -OR- know how to configure "url redirection"
307 1. Copy the htaccess.sample file to .htaccess in your Laconica
308 directory. Note: if you have control of your server's httpd.conf or
309 similar configuration files, it can greatly improve performance to
310 import the .htaccess file into your conf file instead. If you're
311 not sure how to do it, you may save yourself a lot of headache by
312 just leaving the .htaccess file.
314 2. Change the "RewriteBase" in the new .htaccess file to be the URL path
315 to your Laconica installation on your server. Typically this will
316 be the path to your Laconica directory relative to your Web root.
318 3. Add or uncomment or change a line in your config.php file so it says:
320 $config['site']['fancy'] = true;
322 You should now be able to navigate to a "fancy" URL on your server,
325 http://example.net/mublog/main/register
327 If you changed your HTTP server configuration, you may need to restart
330 If you have problems with the .htaccess file on versions of Apache
331 earlier than 2.2.x, try changing the regular expressions in the
332 htaccess.sample file that use "\w" to just use ".".
337 Laconica supports a cheap-and-dirty system for sending update messages
338 to mobile phones and for receiving updates from the mobile. Instead of
339 sending through the SMS network itself, which is costly and requires
340 buy-in from the wireless carriers, it simply piggybacks on the email
341 gateways that many carriers provide to their customers. So, SMS
342 configuration is essentially email configuration.
344 Each user sends to a made-up email address, which they keep a secret.
345 Incoming email that is "From" the user's SMS email address, and "To"
346 the users' secret email address on the site's domain, will be
347 converted to a message and stored in the DB.
349 For this to work, there *must* be a domain or sub-domain for which all
350 (or most) incoming email can pass through the incoming mail filter.
352 1. Run the SQL script carrier.sql in your Laconica database. This will
355 mysql -u "lacuser" --password="lacpassword" laconica < db/carrier.sql
357 This will populate your database with a list of wireless carriers
358 that support email SMS gateways.
360 2. Make sure the maildaemon.php file is executable:
362 chmod +x scripts/maildaemon.php
364 Note that "daemon" is kind of a misnomer here; the script is more
365 of a filter than a daemon.
367 2. Edit /etc/aliases on your mail server and add the following line:
369 *: /path/to/laconica/scripts/maildaemon.php
371 3. Run whatever code you need to to update your aliases database. For
372 many mail servers (Postfix, Exim, Sendmail), this should work:
376 You may need to restart your mail server for the new database to
379 4. Set the following in your config.php file:
381 $config['mail']['domain'] = 'yourdomain.example.net';
383 At this point, post-by-email and post-by-SMS-gateway should work. Note
384 that if your mail server is on a different computer from your email
385 server, you'll need to have a full installation of Laconica, a working
386 config.php, and access to the Laconica database from the mail server.
391 XMPP (eXtended Message and Presence Protocol, http://xmpp.org/) is the
392 instant-messenger protocol that drives Jabber and GTalk IM. You can
393 distribute messages via XMPP using the system below; however, you
394 need to run the XMPP incoming daemon to allow incoming messages as
397 1. You may want to strongly consider setting up your own XMPP server.
398 Ejabberd, OpenFire, and JabberD are all Open Source servers.
399 Jabber, Inc. provides a high-performance commercial server.
401 2. You must register a Jabber ID (JID) with your new server. It helps
402 to choose a name like "update@example.com" or "notice" or something
403 similar. Alternately, your "update JID" can be registered on a
404 publicly-available XMPP service, like jabber.org or GTalk.
406 Laconica will not register the JID with your chosen XMPP server;
407 you need to do this manually, with an XMPP client like Gajim,
408 Telepathy, or Pidgin.im.
410 3. Configure your site's XMPP variables, as described below in the
411 configuration section.
413 On a default installation, your site can broadcast messages using
414 XMPP. Users won't be able to post messages using XMPP unless you've
415 got the XMPP daemon running. See 'Queues and daemons' below for how
416 to set that up. Also, once you have a sizable number of users, sending
417 a lot of SMS, OMB, and XMPP messages whenever someone posts a message
418 can really slow down your site; it may cause posting to timeout.
420 NOTE: stream_select(), a crucial function for network programming, is
421 broken on PHP 5.2.x less than 5.2.6 on amd64-based servers. We don't
422 work around this bug in Laconica; current recommendation is to move
423 off of amd64 to another server.
428 You can send *all* messages from your microblogging site to a
429 third-party service using XMPP. This can be useful for providing
430 search, indexing, bridging, or other cool services.
432 To configure a downstream site to receive your public stream, add
433 their "JID" (Jabber ID) to your config.php as follows:
435 $config['xmpp']['public'][] = 'downstream@example.net';
437 (Don't miss those square brackets at the end.) Note that your XMPP
438 broadcasting must be configured as mentioned above. Although you can
439 send out messages at "Web time", high-volume sites should strongly
440 consider setting up queues and daemons.
445 Some activities that Laconica needs to do, like broadcast OMB, SMS,
446 and XMPP messages, can be 'queued' and done by off-line bots instead.
447 For this to work, you must be able to run long-running offline
448 processes, either on your main Web server or on another server you
449 control. (Your other server will still need all the above
450 prerequisites, with the exception of Apache.) Installing on a separate
451 server is probably a good idea for high-volume sites.
453 1. You'll need the "CLI" (command-line interface) version of PHP
454 installed on whatever server you use.
456 2. If you're using a separate server for queues, install Laconica
457 somewhere on the server. You don't need to worry about the
458 .htaccess file, but make sure that your config.php file is close
459 to, or identical to, your Web server's version.
461 3. In your config.php files (both the Web server and the queues
462 server!), set the following variable:
464 $config['queue']['enabled'] = true;
466 You may also want to look at the 'daemon' section of this file for
467 more daemon options. Note that if you set the 'user' and/or 'group'
468 options, you'll need to create that user and/or group by hand.
469 They're not created automatically.
471 4. On the queues server, run the command scripts/startdaemons.sh. It
472 needs as a parameter the install path; if you run it from the
473 Laconica dir, "." should suffice.
475 This will run six (for now) queue handlers:
477 * xmppdaemon.php - listens for new XMPP messages from users and stores
478 them as notices in the database.
479 * jabberqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
480 registered users who should receive them.
481 * publicqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
482 public feed listeners.
483 * ombqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to OpenMicroBlogging
484 recipients on foreign servers.
485 * smsqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to SMS-over-email addresses
487 * xmppconfirmhandler.php - sends confirmation messages to registered
490 Note that these queue daemons are pretty raw, and need your care. In
491 particular, they leak memory, and you may want to restart them on a
492 regular (daily or so) basis with a cron job. Also, if they lose
493 the connection to the XMPP server for too long, they'll simply die. It
494 may be a good idea to use a daemon-monitoring service, like 'monit',
495 to check their status and keep them running.
497 All the daemons write their process IDs (pids) to /var/run/ by
498 default. This can be useful for starting, stopping, and monitoring the
504 Sitemap files (http://sitemaps.org/) are a very nice way of telling
505 search engines and other interested bots what's available on your site
506 and what's changed recently. You can generate sitemap files for your
509 1. Choose your sitemap URL layout. Laconica creates a number of
510 sitemap XML files for different parts of your site. You may want to
511 put these in a sub-directory of your Laconica directory to avoid
512 clutter. The sitemap index file tells the search engines and other
513 bots where to find all the sitemap files; it *must* be in the main
514 installation directory or higher. Both types of file must be
515 available through HTTP.
517 2. To generate your sitemaps, run the following command on your server:
519 php scripts/sitemap.php -f index-file-path -d sitemap-directory -u URL-prefix-for-sitemaps
521 Here, index-file-path is the full path to the sitemap index file,
522 like './sitemapindex.xml'. sitemap-directory is the directory where
523 you want the sitemaps stored, like './sitemaps/' (make sure the dir
524 exists). URL-prefix-for-sitemaps is the full URL for the sitemap dir,
525 typically something like 'http://example.net/mublog/sitemaps/'.
527 You can use several methods for submitting your sitemap index to
528 search engines to get your site indexed. One is to add a line like the
529 following to your robots.txt file:
531 Sitemap: /mublog/sitemapindex.xml
533 This is a good idea for letting *all* Web spiders know about your
534 sitemap. You can also submit sitemap files to major search engines
535 using their respective "Webmaster centres"; see sitemaps.org for links
541 There are two themes shipped with this version of Laconica: "stoica",
542 which is what the Identi.ca site uses, and "default", which is a good
543 basis for other sites.
545 As of right now, your ability to change the theme is site-wide; users
546 can't choose their own theme. Additionally, the only thing you can
547 change in the theme is CSS stylesheets and some image files; you can't
548 change the HTML output, like adding or removing menu items.
550 You can choose a theme using the $config['site']['theme'] element in
551 the config.php file. See below for details.
553 You can add your own theme by making a sub-directory of the 'theme'
554 subdirectory with the name of your theme. Each theme can have the
557 display.css: a CSS2 file for "default" styling for all browsers.
558 ie6.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
560 ie7.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
562 logo.png: a logo image for the site.
563 default-avatar-profile.png: a 96x96 pixel image to use as the avatar for
564 users who don't upload their own.
565 default-avatar-stream.png: Ditto, but 48x48. For streams of notices.
566 default-avatar-mini.png: Ditto ditto, but 24x24. For subscriptions
567 listing on profile pages.
569 You may want to start by copying the files from the default theme to
575 Translations in Laconica use the gettext system (http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/).
576 Theoretically, you can add your own sub-directory to the locale/
577 subdirectory to add a new language to your system. You'll need to
578 compile the ".po" files into ".mo" files, however.
580 Contributions of translation information to Laconica are very easy:
581 you can use the Web interface at http://laconi.ca/entrans/ to add one
582 or a few or lots of new translations -- or even new languages. You can
583 also download more up-to-date .po files there, if you so desire.
588 There is no builtin system for doing backups in Laconica. You can make
589 backups of a working Laconica system by backing up the database and
590 the Web directory. To backup the database use mysqldump (http://ur1.ca/7xo)
591 and to backup the Web directory, try tar.
596 If you've been using Laconica 0.6, 0.5 or lower, or if you've been
597 tracking the "darcs" version of the software, you will probably want
598 to upgrade and keep your existing data. There is no automated upgrade
599 procedure in Laconica 0.6.2. Try these step-by-step instructions; read
600 to the end first before trying them.
602 0. Download Laconica and set up all the prerequisites as if you were
604 1. Make backups of both your database and your Web directory. UNDER NO
605 CIRCUMSTANCES should you try to do an upgrade without a known-good
606 backup. You have been warned.
607 2. Shut down Web access to your site, either by turning off your Web
608 server or by redirecting all pages to a "sorry, under maintenance"
610 3. Shut down XMPP access to your site, typically by shutting down the
611 xmppdaemon.php process and all other daemons that you're running.
612 If you've got "monit" or "cron" automatically restarting your
613 daemons, make sure to turn that off, too.
614 4. Shut down SMS and email access to your site. The easy way to do
615 this is to comment out the line piping incoming email to your
616 maildaemon.php file, and running something like "newaliases".
617 5. Once all writing processes to your site are turned off, make a
618 final backup of the Web directory and database.
619 6. Move your Laconica directory to a backup spot, like "mublog.bak".
620 7. Unpack your Laconica 0.6 tarball and move it to "mublog" or
621 wherever your code used to be.
622 8. Copy the config.php file and avatar directory from your old
623 directory to your new directory.
624 9. Copy htaccess.sample to .htaccess in the new directory. Change the
625 RewriteBase to use the correct path.
626 10. Rebuild the database. Go to your Laconica directory and run the
627 rebuilddb.sh script like this:
629 ./scripts/rebuilddb.sh rootuser rootpassword database db/laconica.sql
631 Here, rootuser and rootpassword are the username and password for a
632 user who can drop and create databases as well as tables; typically
633 that's _not_ the user Laconica runs as.
634 11. Use mysql client to log into your database and make sure that the
635 notice, user, profile, subscription etc. tables are non-empty.
636 12. Turn back on the Web server, and check that things still work.
637 13. Turn back on XMPP bots and email maildaemon. Note that the XMPP
638 bots have changed since version 0.5; see above for details.
640 If you're upgrading from very old versions, you may want to look at
641 the fixup_* scripts in the scripts directories. These will store some
642 precooked data in the DB. All upgraders should check out the inboxes
645 NOTE: the database definition file, stoica.ini, has been renamed to
646 laconica.ini (since this is the recommended database name). If you
647 have a line in your config.php pointing to the old name, you'll need
653 Before version 0.6.2, the page showing all notices from people the
654 user is subscribed to ("so-and-so with friends") was calculated at run
655 time. Starting with 0.6.2, we have a new data structure for holding a
656 user's "notice inbox". (Note: distinct from the "message inbox", which
657 is the "inbox" tab in the UI. The notice inbox appears under the
660 Notices are added to the inbox when they're created. This speeds up
661 the query considerably, and also allows us the opportunity, in the
662 future, to add different kind of notices to an inbox -- like @-replies
663 or subscriptions to search terms or hashtags.
665 Notice inboxes are enabled by default for new installations. If you
666 are upgrading an existing site, this means that your users will see
667 empty "Personal" pages. The following steps will help you fix the
670 0. $config['inboxes']['enabled'] can be set to one of three values. If
671 you set it to 'false', the site will work as before. Support for this
672 will probably be dropped in future versions.
673 1. Setting the flag to 'transitional' means that you're in transition.
674 In this mode, the code will run the "new query" or the "old query"
675 based on whether the user's inbox has been updated.
676 2. After setting the flag to "transitional", you can run the
677 fixup_inboxes.php script to create the inboxes. You may want to set
678 the memory limit high. You can re-run it without ill effect.
679 3. When fixup_inboxes is finished, you can set the enabled flag to
682 Configuration options
683 =====================
685 The sole configuration file for Laconica (excepting configurations for
686 dependency software) is config.php in your Laconica directory. If you
687 edit any other file in the directory, like lib/common.php (where most
688 of the defaults are defined), you will lose your configuration options
689 in any upgrade, and you will wish that you had been more careful.
691 Almost all configuration options are made through a two-dimensional
692 associative array, cleverly named $config. A typical configuration
695 $config['section']['option'] = value;
697 For brevity, the following documentation describes each section and
703 This section is a catch-all for site-wide variables.
705 name: the name of your site, like 'YourCompany Microblog'.
706 server: the server part of your site's URLs, like 'example.net'.
707 path: The path part of your site's URLs, like 'mublog' or '/'
709 fancy: whether or not your site uses fancy URLs (see Fancy URLs
710 section above). Default is false.
711 logfile: full path to a file for Laconica to save logging
712 information to. You may want to use this if you don't have
714 locale_path: full path to the directory for locale data. Unless you
715 store all your locale data in one place, you probably
716 don't need to use this.
717 language: default language for your site. Defaults to US English.
718 languages: A list of languages supported on your site. Typically you'd
719 only change this if you wanted to disable support for one
721 "unset($config['site']['languages']['de'])" will disable
723 theme: Theme for your site (see Theme section). Two themes are
724 provided by default: 'default' and 'stoica' (the one used by
725 Identi.ca). It's appreciated if you don't use the 'stoica' theme
726 except as the basis for your own.
727 email: contact email address for your site. By default, it's extracted
728 from your Web server environment; you may want to customize it.
729 broughtbyurl: name of an organization or individual who provides the
730 service. Each page will include a link to this name in the
731 footer. A good way to link to the blog, forum, wiki,
732 corporate portal, or whoever is making the service available.
733 broughtby: text used for the "brought by" link.
734 timezone: default timezone for message display. Users can set their
735 own time zone. Defaults to 'UTC', which is a pretty good default.
736 closed: If set to 'true', will disallow registration on your site.
737 This is a cheap way to restrict accounts to only one
738 individual or group; just register the accounts you want on
739 the service, *then* set this variable to 'true'.
740 inviteonly: If set to 'true', will only allow registration if the user
741 was invited by an existing user.
746 This section is a reference to the configuration options for
747 DB_DataObject (see http://ur1.ca/7xp). The ones that you may want to
748 set are listed below for clarity.
750 database: a DSN (Data Source Name) for your Laconica database. This is
751 in the format 'protocol://username:password@hostname/databasename',
752 where 'protocol' is 'mysql' (or possibly 'postgresql', if you
753 really know what you're doing), 'username' is the username,
754 'password' is the password, and etc.
755 ini_yourdbname: if your database is not named 'laconica', you'll need
756 to set this to point to the location of the
757 laconica.ini file. Note that the real name of your database
758 should go in there, not literally 'yourdbname'.
759 db_driver: You can try changing this to 'MDB2' to use the other driver
760 type for DB_DataObject, but note that it breaks the OpenID
761 libraries, which only support PEAR::DB.
762 debug: On a database error, you may get a message saying to set this
763 value to 5 to see debug messages in the browser. This breaks
764 just about all pages, and will also expose the username and
766 quote_identifiers: Set this to true if you're using postgresql.
767 type: either 'mysql' or 'postgresql' (used for some bits of
768 database-type-specific SQL in the code). Defaults to mysql.
769 mirror: you can set this to an array of DSNs, like the above
770 'database' value. If it's set, certain read-only actions will
771 use a random value out of this array for the database, rather
772 than the one in 'database' (actually, 'database' is overwritten).
773 You can offload a busy DB server by setting up MySQL replication
774 and adding the slaves to this array. Note that if you want some
775 requests to go to the 'database' (master) server, you'll need
776 to include it in this array, too.
781 By default, Laconica sites log error messages to the syslog facility.
782 (You can override this using the 'logfile' parameter described above).
784 appname: The name that Laconica uses to log messages. By default it's
785 "laconica", but if you have more than one installation on the
786 server, you may want to change the name for each instance so
787 you can track log messages more easily.
792 You can configure the software to queue time-consuming tasks, like
793 sending out SMS email or XMPP messages, for off-line processing. See
794 'Queues and daemons' above for how to set this up.
796 enabled: Whether to uses queues. Defaults to false.
801 The default license to use for your users notices. The default is the
802 Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which is probably the right
803 choice for any public site. Note that some other servers will not
804 accept notices if you apply a stricter license than this.
806 url: URL of the license, used for links.
807 title: Title for the license, like 'Creative Commons Attribution 3.0'.
808 image: A button shown on each page for the license.
813 This is for configuring out-going email. We use PEAR's Mail module,
814 see: http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.mail.mail.factory.php
816 backend: the backend to use for mail, one of 'mail', 'sendmail', and
817 'smtp'. Defaults to PEAR's default, 'mail'.
818 params: if the mail backend requires any parameters, you can provide
819 them in an associative array.
824 This is for configuring nicknames in the service.
826 blacklist: an array of strings for usernames that may not be
827 registered. A default array exists for strings that are
828 used by Laconica (e.g. 'doc', 'main', 'avatar', 'theme')
829 but you may want to add others if you have other software
830 installed in a subdirectory of Laconica or if you just
831 don't want certain words used as usernames.
836 For configuring avatar access.
838 server: If set, defines another server where avatars are stored in the
839 root directory. Note that the 'avatar' subdir still has to be
840 writeable. You'd typically use this to split HTTP requests on
841 the client to speed up page loading, either with another
842 virtual server or with an NFS or SAMBA share. Clients
843 typically only make 2 connections to a single server at a
844 time (http://ur1.ca/6ih), so this can parallelize the job.
850 For configuring the public stream.
852 localonly: If set to true, only messages posted by users of this
853 service (rather than other services, filtered through OMB)
854 are shown in the public stream. Default true.
859 server: Like avatars, you can speed up page loading by pointing the
860 theme file lookup to another server (virtual or real). The
861 theme server's root path should map to the Laconica "theme"
862 subdirectory. Defaults to NULL.
867 For configuring the XMPP sub-system.
869 enabled: Whether to accept and send messages by XMPP. Default false.
870 server: server part of XMPP ID for update user.
871 port: connection port for clients. Default 5222, which you probably
872 shouldn't need to change.
873 user: username for the client connection. Users will receive messages
874 from 'user'@'server'.
875 resource: a unique identifier for the connection to the server. This
876 is actually used as a prefix for each XMPP component in the system.
877 password: password for the user account.
878 host: some XMPP domains are served by machines with a different
879 hostname. (For example, @gmail.com GTalk users connect to
880 talk.google.com). Set this to the correct hostname if that's the
881 case with your server.
882 encryption: Whether to encrypt the connection between Laconica and the
883 XMPP server. Defaults to true, but you can get
884 considerably better performance turning it off if you're
885 connecting to a server on the same machine or on a
887 debug: if turned on, this will make the XMPP library blurt out all of
888 the incoming and outgoing messages as XML stanzas. Use as a
889 last resort, and never turn it on if you don't have queues
890 enabled, since it will spit out sensitive data to the browser.
891 public: an array of JIDs to send _all_ notices to. This is useful for
892 participating in third-party search and archiving services.
897 Miscellaneous tagging stuff.
899 dropoff: Decay factor for tag listing, in seconds.
900 Defaults to exponential decay over ten days; you can twiddle
901 with it to try and get better results for your site.
906 For daemon processes.
908 piddir: directory that daemon processes should write their PID file
909 (process ID) to. Defaults to /var/run/, which is where this
910 stuff should usually go on Unix-ish systems.
911 user: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective user ID
912 to this user before running. Probably a good idea, especially if
913 you start the daemons as root. Note: user name, like 'daemon',
915 group: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective group ID
916 to this named group. Again, a name, not a numerical ID.
921 You can get a significant boost in performance by caching some
922 database data in memcached (http://www.danga.com/memcached/).
924 enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
925 server: a string with the hostname of the memcached server. Can also
926 be an array of hostnames, if you've got more than one server.
931 A catch-all for integration with other systems.
933 source: The name to use for the source of posts to Twitter. Defaults
934 to 'laconica', but if you request your own source name from
935 Twitter (http://twitter.com/help/request_source), you can use
936 that here instead. Status updates on Twitter will then have
944 enabled: A three-valued flag for whether to use notice inboxes (see
945 upgrading info above for notes about this change). Can be
946 'false', 'true', or '"transitional"'.
951 The primary output for Laconica is syslog, unless you configured a
952 separate logfile. This is probably the first place to look if you're
953 getting weird behaviour from Laconica.
955 If you're tracking the unstable version of Laconica in the darcs
956 repository (see below), and you get a compilation error ("unexpected
957 T_STRING") in the browser, check to see that you don't have any
958 conflicts in your code.
960 If you upgraded to Laconica 0.6.2 without reading the "Notice inboxes"
961 section above, and all your users' 'Personal' tabs are empty, read the
962 "Notice inboxes" section above.
967 These are some myths you may see on the Web about Laconica.
968 Documentation from the core team about Laconica has been pretty
969 sparse, so some backtracking and guesswork resulted in some incorrect
972 - "Set $config['db']['debug'] = 5 to debug the database." This is an
973 extremely bad idea. It's a tool built into DB_DataObject that will
974 emit oodles of print lines directly to the browser of your users.
975 Among these lines will be your database username and password. Do
976 not enable this option on a production Web site for any reason.
978 - "Edit dataobject.ini with the following settings..." dataobject.ini
979 is a development file for the DB_DataObject framework and is not
980 used by the running software. It was removed from the Laconica
981 distribution because its presence was confusing. Do not bother
982 configuring dataobject.ini, and do not put your database username
983 and password into the file on a production Web server; unscrupulous
984 persons may try to read it to get your passwords.
989 If you're adventurous or impatient, you may want to install the
990 development version of Laconica. To get it, use the darcs version
991 control tool (http://darcs.net/) like so:
993 darcs get http://laconi.ca/darcs/ mublog
995 To keep it up-to-date, use 'darcs pull'. Watch for conflicts!
1000 There are several ways to get more information about Laconica.
1002 * There is a mailing list for Laconica developers and admins at
1003 http://mail.laconi.ca/mailman/listinfo/laconica-dev
1004 * The #laconica IRC channel on freenode.net (http://www.freenode.net/).
1005 * The Laconica wiki, http://laconi.ca/trac/
1010 * Microblogging messages to http://identi.ca/evan are very welcome.
1011 * Laconica's Trac server has a bug tracker for any defects you may find,
1012 or ideas for making things better. http://laconi.ca/trac/
1013 * e-mail to evan@identi.ca will usually be read and responded to very
1014 quickly, unless the question is really hard.
1019 The following is an incomplete list of developers who've worked on
1020 Laconi.ca. Apologies for any oversight; please let evan@identi.ca know
1021 if anyone's been overlooked in error.
1023 * Evan Prodromou, founder and lead developer, Control Yourself, Inc.
1024 * Zach Copley, Control Yourself, Inc.
1025 * Earle Martin, Control Yourself, Inc.
1026 * Marie-Claude Doyon, designer, Control Yourself, Inc.
1027 * Sarven Capadisli, Control Yourself, Inc.
1028 * Robin Millette, Control Yourself, Inc.
1039 * Ken Sheppardson (Trac server, man-about-town)
1040 * Tiago 'gouki' Faria (entrans)
1041 * Tryggvi Björgvinsson
1043 Thanks also to the developers of our upstream library code and to the
1044 thousands of people who have tried out Identi.ca, installed Laconi.ca,
1045 told their friends, and built the Open Microblogging network to what