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. You should also take this moment to make your avatar subdirectory
240 writeable by the Web server. An insecure way to do this is:
242 chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/avatar
244 On some systems, this will probably work:
246 chgrp www-data /var/www/mublog/avatar
247 chmod g+w /var/www/mublog/avatar
249 If your Web server runs as another user besides "www-data", try
250 that user's default group instead. As a last resort, you can create
251 a new group like "avatar" and add the Web server's user to the group.
253 4. Create a database to hold your microblog data. Something like this
256 mysqladmin -u "username" --password="password" create laconica
258 Note that Laconica must have its own database; you can't share the
259 database with another program. You can name it whatever you want,
262 (If you don't have shell access to your server, you may need to use
263 a tool like PHPAdmin to create a database. Check your hosting
264 service's documentation for how to create a new MySQL database.)
266 5. Run the laconica.sql SQL script in the db subdirectory to create
267 the database tables in the database. A typical system would work
270 mysql -u "username" --password="password" laconica < /var/www/mublog/db/laconica.sql
272 You may want to test by logging into the database and checking that
273 the tables were created. Here's an example:
277 6. Create a new database account that Laconica will use to access the
278 database. If you have shell access, this will probably work from the
281 GRANT SELECT,INSERT,DELETE,UPDATE on laconica.*
282 TO 'lacuser'@'localhost'
283 IDENTIFIED BY 'lacpassword';
285 You should change 'lacuser' and 'lacpassword' to your preferred new
286 username and password. You may want to test logging in as this new
287 user and testing that you can SELECT from some of the tables in the
288 DB (use SHOW TABLES to see which ones are there).
290 7. Copy the config.php.sample in the Laconica directory to config.php.
292 8. Edit config.php to set the basic configuration for your system.
293 (See descriptions below for basic config options.) Note that there
294 are lots of options and if you try to do them all at once, you will
295 have a hard time making sure what's working and what's not. So,
296 stick with the basics at first. In particular, customizing the
297 'site' and 'db' settings will almost definitely be needed.
299 9. At this point, you should be able to navigate in a browser to your
300 microblog's main directory and see the "Public Timeline", which
301 will be empty. If not, magic has happened! You can now register a
302 new user, post some notices, edit your profile, etc. However, you
303 may want to wait to do that stuff if you think you can set up
304 "fancy URLs" (see below), since some URLs are stored in the database.
309 By default, Laconica will have big long sloppy URLs that are hard for
310 people to remember or use. For example, a user's home profile might be
313 http://example.org/mublog/index.php?action=showstream&nickname=fred
315 It's possible to configure the software so it looks like this instead:
317 http://example.org/mublog/fred
319 These "fancy URLs" are more readable and memorable for users. To use
320 fancy URLs, you must either have Apache 2.2.x with .htaccess enabled
321 and mod_redirect enabled, -OR- know how to configure "url redirection"
324 1. Copy the htaccess.sample file to .htaccess in your Laconica
325 directory. Note: if you have control of your server's httpd.conf or
326 similar configuration files, it can greatly improve performance to
327 import the .htaccess file into your conf file instead. If you're
328 not sure how to do it, you may save yourself a lot of headache by
329 just leaving the .htaccess file.
331 2. Change the "RewriteBase" in the new .htaccess file to be the URL path
332 to your Laconica installation on your server. Typically this will
333 be the path to your Laconica directory relative to your Web root.
335 3. Add or uncomment or change a line in your config.php file so it says:
337 $config['site']['fancy'] = true;
339 You should now be able to navigate to a "fancy" URL on your server,
342 http://example.net/mublog/main/register
344 If you changed your HTTP server configuration, you may need to restart
347 If you have problems with the .htaccess file on versions of Apache
348 earlier than 2.2.x, try changing the regular expressions in the
349 htaccess.sample file that use "\w" to just use ".".
354 To use a Sphinx server to search users and notices, you also need
355 to install, compile and enable the sphinx pecl extension for php on the
356 client side, which itself depends on the sphinx development files.
357 "pecl install sphinx" should take care of that. Add "extension=sphinx.so"
358 to your php.ini and reload apache to enable it.
360 You can update your MySQL or Postgresql databases to drop their fulltext
361 search indexes, since they're now provided by sphinx.
363 On the sphinx server side, a script reads the main database and build
364 the keyword index. A cron job reads the database and keeps the sphinx
365 indexes up to date. scripts/sphinx-cron.sh should be called by cron
366 every 5 minutes, for example. scripts/sphinx.sh is an init.d script
367 to start and stop the sphinx search daemon.
372 Laconica supports a cheap-and-dirty system for sending update messages
373 to mobile phones and for receiving updates from the mobile. Instead of
374 sending through the SMS network itself, which is costly and requires
375 buy-in from the wireless carriers, it simply piggybacks on the email
376 gateways that many carriers provide to their customers. So, SMS
377 configuration is essentially email configuration.
379 Each user sends to a made-up email address, which they keep a secret.
380 Incoming email that is "From" the user's SMS email address, and "To"
381 the users' secret email address on the site's domain, will be
382 converted to a notice and stored in the DB.
384 For this to work, there *must* be a domain or sub-domain for which all
385 (or most) incoming email can pass through the incoming mail filter.
387 1. Run the SQL script carrier.sql in your Laconica database. This will
390 mysql -u "lacuser" --password="lacpassword" laconica < db/carrier.sql
392 This will populate your database with a list of wireless carriers
393 that support email SMS gateways.
395 2. Make sure the maildaemon.php file is executable:
397 chmod +x scripts/maildaemon.php
399 Note that "daemon" is kind of a misnomer here; the script is more
400 of a filter than a daemon.
402 2. Edit /etc/aliases on your mail server and add the following line:
404 *: /path/to/laconica/scripts/maildaemon.php
406 3. Run whatever code you need to to update your aliases database. For
407 many mail servers (Postfix, Exim, Sendmail), this should work:
411 You may need to restart your mail server for the new database to
414 4. Set the following in your config.php file:
416 $config['mail']['domain'] = 'yourdomain.example.net';
418 At this point, post-by-email and post-by-SMS-gateway should work. Note
419 that if your mail server is on a different computer from your email
420 server, you'll need to have a full installation of Laconica, a working
421 config.php, and access to the Laconica database from the mail server.
426 XMPP (eXtended Message and Presence Protocol, <http://xmpp.org/>) is the
427 instant-messenger protocol that drives Jabber and GTalk IM. You can
428 distribute messages via XMPP using the system below; however, you
429 need to run the XMPP incoming daemon to allow incoming messages as
432 1. You may want to strongly consider setting up your own XMPP server.
433 Ejabberd, OpenFire, and JabberD are all Open Source servers.
434 Jabber, Inc. provides a high-performance commercial server.
436 2. You must register a Jabber ID (JID) with your new server. It helps
437 to choose a name like "update@example.com" or "notice" or something
438 similar. Alternately, your "update JID" can be registered on a
439 publicly-available XMPP service, like jabber.org or GTalk.
441 Laconica will not register the JID with your chosen XMPP server;
442 you need to do this manually, with an XMPP client like Gajim,
443 Telepathy, or Pidgin.im.
445 3. Configure your site's XMPP variables, as described below in the
446 configuration section.
448 On a default installation, your site can broadcast messages using
449 XMPP. Users won't be able to post messages using XMPP unless you've
450 got the XMPP daemon running. See 'Queues and daemons' below for how
451 to set that up. Also, once you have a sizable number of users, sending
452 a lot of SMS, OMB, and XMPP messages whenever someone posts a message
453 can really slow down your site; it may cause posting to timeout.
455 NOTE: stream_select(), a crucial function for network programming, is
456 broken on PHP 5.2.x less than 5.2.6 on amd64-based servers. We don't
457 work around this bug in Laconica; current recommendation is to move
458 off of amd64 to another server.
463 You can send *all* messages from your microblogging site to a
464 third-party service using XMPP. This can be useful for providing
465 search, indexing, bridging, or other cool services.
467 To configure a downstream site to receive your public stream, add
468 their "JID" (Jabber ID) to your config.php as follows:
470 $config['xmpp']['public'][] = 'downstream@example.net';
472 (Don't miss those square brackets at the end.) Note that your XMPP
473 broadcasting must be configured as mentioned above. Although you can
474 send out messages at "Web time", high-volume sites should strongly
475 consider setting up queues and daemons.
480 Some activities that Laconica needs to do, like broadcast OMB, SMS,
481 and XMPP messages, can be 'queued' and done by off-line bots instead.
482 For this to work, you must be able to run long-running offline
483 processes, either on your main Web server or on another server you
484 control. (Your other server will still need all the above
485 prerequisites, with the exception of Apache.) Installing on a separate
486 server is probably a good idea for high-volume sites.
488 1. You'll need the "CLI" (command-line interface) version of PHP
489 installed on whatever server you use.
491 2. If you're using a separate server for queues, install Laconica
492 somewhere on the server. You don't need to worry about the
493 .htaccess file, but make sure that your config.php file is close
494 to, or identical to, your Web server's version.
496 3. In your config.php files (both the Web server and the queues
497 server!), set the following variable:
499 $config['queue']['enabled'] = true;
501 You may also want to look at the 'daemon' section of this file for
502 more daemon options. Note that if you set the 'user' and/or 'group'
503 options, you'll need to create that user and/or group by hand.
504 They're not created automatically.
506 4. On the queues server, run the command scripts/startdaemons.sh. It
507 needs as a parameter the install path; if you run it from the
508 Laconica dir, "." should suffice.
510 This will run eight (for now) queue handlers:
512 * xmppdaemon.php - listens for new XMPP messages from users and stores
513 them as notices in the database.
514 * jabberqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
515 registered users who should receive them.
516 * publicqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
517 public feed listeners.
518 * ombqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to OpenMicroBlogging
519 recipients on foreign servers.
520 * smsqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to SMS-over-email addresses
522 * xmppconfirmhandler.php - sends confirmation messages to registered
524 * twitterqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to Twitter for user
525 who have opted to set up Twitter bridging.
526 * facebookqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to Facebook for users
527 of the built-in Facebook application.
529 Note that these queue daemons are pretty raw, and need your care. In
530 particular, they leak memory, and you may want to restart them on a
531 regular (daily or so) basis with a cron job. Also, if they lose
532 the connection to the XMPP server for too long, they'll simply die. It
533 may be a good idea to use a daemon-monitoring service, like 'monit',
534 to check their status and keep them running.
536 All the daemons write their process IDs (pids) to /var/run/ by
537 default. This can be useful for starting, stopping, and monitoring the
540 Twitter Friends Syncing
541 -----------------------
543 As of Laconica 0.6.3, users may set a flag in their settings ("Subscribe
544 to my Twitter friends here" under the Twitter tab) to have Laconica
545 attempt to locate and subscribe to "friends" (people they "follow") on
546 Twitter who also have accounts on your Laconica system, and who have
547 previously set up a link for automatically posting notices to Twitter.
549 Optionally, there is a script (./scripts/synctwitterfriends.php), meant
550 to be run periodically from a job scheduler (e.g.: cron under Unix), to
551 look for new additions to users' friends lists. Note that the friends
552 syncing only subscribes users to each other, it does not unsubscribe
553 users when they stop following each other on Twitter.
557 # Update Twitter friends subscriptions every half hour
558 0,30 * * * * /path/to/php /path/to/laconica/scripts/synctwitterfriends.php>&/dev/null
560 Built-in Facebook Application
561 -----------------------------
563 Laconica's Facebook application allows your users to automatically
564 update their Facebook statuses with their latest notices, invite
565 their friends to use the app (and thus your site), view their notice
566 timelines, and post notices -- all from within Facebook. The application
567 is built into Laconica and runs on your host. For automatic Facebook
568 status updating to work you will need to enable queuing and run the
569 facebookqueuehandler.php daemon (see the "Queues and daemons" section
572 Quick setup instructions*:
574 Install the Facebook Developer application on Facebook:
576 http://www.facebook.com/developers/
578 Use it to create a new application and generate an API key and secret.
579 Uncomment the Facebook app section of your config.php and copy in the
580 key and secret, e.g.:
582 # Config section for the built-in Facebook application
583 $config['facebook']['apikey'] = 'APIKEY';
584 $config['facebook']['secret'] = 'SECRET';
586 In Facebook's application editor, specify the following URLs for your app:
588 - Callback URL: http://example.net/mublog/facebook/
589 - Post-Remove URL: http://example.net/mublog/facebook/remove
590 - Post-Add Redirect URL: http://apps.facebook.com/yourapp/
591 - Canvas URL: http://apps.facebook.com/yourapp/
593 (Replace 'example.net' with your host's URL, 'mublog' with the path
594 to your Laconica installation, and 'yourapp' with the name of the
595 Facebook application you created.)
597 Additionally, Choose "Web" for Application type in the Advanced tab.
598 In the "Canvas setting" section, choose the "FBML" for Render Method,
599 "Smart Size" for IFrame size, and "Full width (760px)" for Canvas Width.
600 Everything else can be left with default values.
602 *For more detailed instructions please see the installation guide on the
605 http://laconi.ca/trac/wiki/FacebookApplication
610 Sitemap files <http://sitemaps.org/> are a very nice way of telling
611 search engines and other interested bots what's available on your site
612 and what's changed recently. You can generate sitemap files for your
615 1. Choose your sitemap URL layout. Laconica creates a number of
616 sitemap XML files for different parts of your site. You may want to
617 put these in a sub-directory of your Laconica directory to avoid
618 clutter. The sitemap index file tells the search engines and other
619 bots where to find all the sitemap files; it *must* be in the main
620 installation directory or higher. Both types of file must be
621 available through HTTP.
623 2. To generate your sitemaps, run the following command on your server:
625 php scripts/sitemap.php -f index-file-path -d sitemap-directory -u URL-prefix-for-sitemaps
627 Here, index-file-path is the full path to the sitemap index file,
628 like './sitemapindex.xml'. sitemap-directory is the directory where
629 you want the sitemaps stored, like './sitemaps/' (make sure the dir
630 exists). URL-prefix-for-sitemaps is the full URL for the sitemap dir,
631 typically something like <http://example.net/mublog/sitemaps/>.
633 You can use several methods for submitting your sitemap index to
634 search engines to get your site indexed. One is to add a line like the
635 following to your robots.txt file:
637 Sitemap: /mublog/sitemapindex.xml
639 This is a good idea for letting *all* Web spiders know about your
640 sitemap. You can also submit sitemap files to major search engines
641 using their respective "Webmaster centres"; see sitemaps.org for links
647 There are two themes shipped with this version of Laconica: "stoica",
648 which is what the Identi.ca site uses, and "default", which is a good
649 basis for other sites.
651 As of right now, your ability to change the theme is site-wide; users
652 can't choose their own theme. Additionally, the only thing you can
653 change in the theme is CSS stylesheets and some image files; you can't
654 change the HTML output, like adding or removing menu items.
656 You can choose a theme using the $config['site']['theme'] element in
657 the config.php file. See below for details.
659 You can add your own theme by making a sub-directory of the 'theme'
660 subdirectory with the name of your theme. Each theme can have the
663 display.css: a CSS2 file for "default" styling for all browsers.
664 ie6.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
666 ie7.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
668 logo.png: a logo image for the site.
669 default-avatar-profile.png: a 96x96 pixel image to use as the avatar for
670 users who don't upload their own.
671 default-avatar-stream.png: Ditto, but 48x48. For streams of notices.
672 default-avatar-mini.png: Ditto ditto, but 24x24. For subscriptions
673 listing on profile pages.
675 You may want to start by copying the files from the default theme to
678 NOTE: the HTML generated by Laconica changed *radically* between
679 version 0.6.x and 0.7.x. Older themes will need signification
680 modification to use the new output format.
685 Translations in Laconica use the gettext system <http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/>.
686 Theoretically, you can add your own sub-directory to the locale/
687 subdirectory to add a new language to your system. You'll need to
688 compile the ".po" files into ".mo" files, however.
690 Contributions of translation information to Laconica are very easy:
691 you can use the Web interface at http://laconi.ca/pootle/ to add one
692 or a few or lots of new translations -- or even new languages. You can
693 also download more up-to-date .po files there, if you so desire.
698 There is no built-in system for doing backups in Laconica. You can make
699 backups of a working Laconica system by backing up the database and
700 the Web directory. To backup the database use mysqldump <http://ur1.ca/7xo>
701 and to backup the Web directory, try tar.
706 The administrator can set the "private" flag for a site so that it's
707 not visible to non-logged-in users. This might be useful for
708 workgroups who want to share a microblogging site for project
709 management, but host it on a public server.
711 Note that this is an experimental feature; total privacy is not
712 guaranteed or ensured. Also, privacy is all-or-nothing for a site; you
713 can't have some accounts or notices private, and others public.
714 Finally, the interaction of private sites with OpenMicroBlogging is
715 undefined. Remote users won't be able to subscribe to users on a
716 private site, but users of the private site may be able to subscribe
717 to users on a remote site. (Or not... it's not well tested.) The
718 "proper behaviour" hasn't been defined here, so handle with care.
723 If you've been using Laconica 0.6, 0.5 or lower, or if you've been
724 tracking the "git" version of the software, you will probably want
725 to upgrade and keep your existing data. There is no automated upgrade
726 procedure in Laconica 0.7.1. Try these step-by-step instructions; read
727 to the end first before trying them.
729 0. Download Laconica and set up all the prerequisites as if you were
731 1. Make backups of both your database and your Web directory. UNDER NO
732 CIRCUMSTANCES should you try to do an upgrade without a known-good
733 backup. You have been warned.
734 2. Shut down Web access to your site, either by turning off your Web
735 server or by redirecting all pages to a "sorry, under maintenance"
737 3. Shut down XMPP access to your site, typically by shutting down the
738 xmppdaemon.php process and all other daemons that you're running.
739 If you've got "monit" or "cron" automatically restarting your
740 daemons, make sure to turn that off, too.
741 4. Shut down SMS and email access to your site. The easy way to do
742 this is to comment out the line piping incoming email to your
743 maildaemon.php file, and running something like "newaliases".
744 5. Once all writing processes to your site are turned off, make a
745 final backup of the Web directory and database.
746 6. Move your Laconica directory to a backup spot, like "mublog.bak".
747 7. Unpack your Laconica 0.6 tarball and move it to "mublog" or
748 wherever your code used to be.
749 8. Copy the config.php file and avatar directory from your old
750 directory to your new directory.
751 9. Copy htaccess.sample to .htaccess in the new directory. Change the
752 RewriteBase to use the correct path.
753 10. Rebuild the database. Go to your Laconica directory and run the
754 rebuilddb.sh script like this:
756 ./scripts/rebuilddb.sh rootuser rootpassword database db/laconica.sql
758 Here, rootuser and rootpassword are the username and password for a
759 user who can drop and create databases as well as tables; typically
760 that's _not_ the user Laconica runs as.
761 11. Use mysql client to log into your database and make sure that the
762 notice, user, profile, subscription etc. tables are non-empty.
763 12. Turn back on the Web server, and check that things still work.
764 13. Turn back on XMPP bots and email maildaemon. Note that the XMPP
765 bots have changed since version 0.5; see above for details.
767 If you're upgrading from very old versions, you may want to look at
768 the fixup_* scripts in the scripts directories. These will store some
769 precooked data in the DB. All upgraders should check out the inboxes
772 NOTE: the database definition file, stoica.ini, has been renamed to
773 laconica.ini (since this is the recommended database name). If you
774 have a line in your config.php pointing to the old name, you'll need
780 Before version 0.6.2, the page showing all notices from people the
781 user is subscribed to ("so-and-so with friends") was calculated at run
782 time. Starting with 0.6.2, we have a new data structure for holding a
783 user's "notice inbox". (Note: distinct from the "message inbox", which
784 is the "inbox" tab in the UI. The notice inbox appears under the
787 Notices are added to the inbox when they're created. This speeds up
788 the query considerably, and also allows us the opportunity, in the
789 future, to add different kind of notices to an inbox -- like @-replies
790 or subscriptions to search terms or hashtags.
792 Notice inboxes are enabled by default for new installations. If you
793 are upgrading an existing site, this means that your users will see
794 empty "Personal" pages. The following steps will help you fix the
797 0. $config['inboxes']['enabled'] can be set to one of three values. If
798 you set it to 'false', the site will work as before. Support for this
799 will probably be dropped in future versions.
800 1. Setting the flag to 'transitional' means that you're in transition.
801 In this mode, the code will run the "new query" or the "old query"
802 based on whether the user's inbox has been updated.
803 2. After setting the flag to "transitional", you can run the
804 fixup_inboxes.php script to create the inboxes. You may want to set
805 the memory limit high. You can re-run it without ill effect.
806 3. When fixup_inboxes is finished, you can set the enabled flag to
809 Configuration options
810 =====================
812 The sole configuration file for Laconica (excepting configurations for
813 dependency software) is config.php in your Laconica directory. If you
814 edit any other file in the directory, like lib/common.php (where most
815 of the defaults are defined), you will lose your configuration options
816 in any upgrade, and you will wish that you had been more careful.
818 Starting with version 0.7.1, you can put config files in the
819 /etc/laconica/ directory on your server, if it exists. Config files
820 will be included in this order:
822 * /etc/laconica/laconica.php - server-wide config
823 * /etc/laconica/<servername>.php - for a virtual host
824 * /etc/laconica/<servername>_<pathname>.php - for a path
825 * INSTALLDIR/config.php - for a particular implementation
827 Almost all configuration options are made through a two-dimensional
828 associative array, cleverly named $config. A typical configuration
831 $config['section']['option'] = value;
833 For brevity, the following documentation describes each section and
839 This section is a catch-all for site-wide variables.
841 name: the name of your site, like 'YourCompany Microblog'.
842 server: the server part of your site's URLs, like 'example.net'.
843 path: The path part of your site's URLs, like 'mublog' or '/'
845 fancy: whether or not your site uses fancy URLs (see Fancy URLs
846 section above). Default is false.
847 logfile: full path to a file for Laconica to save logging
848 information to. You may want to use this if you don't have
850 locale_path: full path to the directory for locale data. Unless you
851 store all your locale data in one place, you probably
852 don't need to use this.
853 language: default language for your site. Defaults to US English.
854 languages: A list of languages supported on your site. Typically you'd
855 only change this if you wanted to disable support for one
857 "unset($config['site']['languages']['de'])" will disable
859 theme: Theme for your site (see Theme section). Two themes are
860 provided by default: 'default' and 'stoica' (the one used by
861 Identi.ca). It's appreciated if you don't use the 'stoica' theme
862 except as the basis for your own.
863 email: contact email address for your site. By default, it's extracted
864 from your Web server environment; you may want to customize it.
865 broughtbyurl: name of an organization or individual who provides the
866 service. Each page will include a link to this name in the
867 footer. A good way to link to the blog, forum, wiki,
868 corporate portal, or whoever is making the service available.
869 broughtby: text used for the "brought by" link.
870 timezone: default timezone for message display. Users can set their
871 own time zone. Defaults to 'UTC', which is a pretty good default.
872 closed: If set to 'true', will disallow registration on your site.
873 This is a cheap way to restrict accounts to only one
874 individual or group; just register the accounts you want on
875 the service, *then* set this variable to 'true'.
876 inviteonly: If set to 'true', will only allow registration if the user
877 was invited by an existing user.
878 private: If set to 'true', anonymous users will be redirected to the
879 'login' page. Also, API methods that normally require no
880 authentication will require it. Note that this does not turn
881 off registration; use 'closed' or 'inviteonly' for the
883 notice: A plain string that will appear on every page. A good place
884 to put introductory information about your service, or info about
885 upgrades and outages, or other community info. Any HTML will
891 This section is a reference to the configuration options for
892 DB_DataObject (see <http://ur1.ca/7xp>). The ones that you may want to
893 set are listed below for clarity.
895 database: a DSN (Data Source Name) for your Laconica database. This is
896 in the format 'protocol://username:password@hostname/databasename',
897 where 'protocol' is 'mysql' or 'mysqli' (or possibly 'postgresql', if you
898 really know what you're doing), 'username' is the username,
899 'password' is the password, and etc.
900 ini_yourdbname: if your database is not named 'laconica', you'll need
901 to set this to point to the location of the
902 laconica.ini file. Note that the real name of your database
903 should go in there, not literally 'yourdbname'.
904 db_driver: You can try changing this to 'MDB2' to use the other driver
905 type for DB_DataObject, but note that it breaks the OpenID
906 libraries, which only support PEAR::DB.
907 debug: On a database error, you may get a message saying to set this
908 value to 5 to see debug messages in the browser. This breaks
909 just about all pages, and will also expose the username and
911 quote_identifiers: Set this to true if you're using postgresql.
912 type: either 'mysql' or 'postgresql' (used for some bits of
913 database-type-specific SQL in the code). Defaults to mysql.
914 mirror: you can set this to an array of DSNs, like the above
915 'database' value. If it's set, certain read-only actions will
916 use a random value out of this array for the database, rather
917 than the one in 'database' (actually, 'database' is overwritten).
918 You can offload a busy DB server by setting up MySQL replication
919 and adding the slaves to this array. Note that if you want some
920 requests to go to the 'database' (master) server, you'll need
921 to include it in this array, too.
926 By default, Laconica sites log error messages to the syslog facility.
927 (You can override this using the 'logfile' parameter described above).
929 appname: The name that Laconica uses to log messages. By default it's
930 "laconica", but if you have more than one installation on the
931 server, you may want to change the name for each instance so
932 you can track log messages more easily.
937 You can configure the software to queue time-consuming tasks, like
938 sending out SMS email or XMPP messages, for off-line processing. See
939 'Queues and daemons' above for how to set this up.
941 enabled: Whether to uses queues. Defaults to false.
946 The default license to use for your users notices. The default is the
947 Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which is probably the right
948 choice for any public site. Note that some other servers will not
949 accept notices if you apply a stricter license than this.
951 url: URL of the license, used for links.
952 title: Title for the license, like 'Creative Commons Attribution 3.0'.
953 image: A button shown on each page for the license.
958 This is for configuring out-going email. We use PEAR's Mail module,
959 see: http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.mail.mail.factory.php
961 backend: the backend to use for mail, one of 'mail', 'sendmail', and
962 'smtp'. Defaults to PEAR's default, 'mail'.
963 params: if the mail backend requires any parameters, you can provide
964 them in an associative array.
969 This is for configuring nicknames in the service.
971 blacklist: an array of strings for usernames that may not be
972 registered. A default array exists for strings that are
973 used by Laconica (e.g. 'doc', 'main', 'avatar', 'theme')
974 but you may want to add others if you have other software
975 installed in a subdirectory of Laconica or if you just
976 don't want certain words used as usernames.
977 featured: an array of nicknames of 'featured' users of the site.
978 Can be useful to draw attention to well-known users, or
979 interesting people, or whatever.
984 For configuring avatar access.
986 server: If set, defines another server where avatars are stored in the
987 root directory. Note that the 'avatar' subdir still has to be
988 writeable. You'd typically use this to split HTTP requests on
989 the client to speed up page loading, either with another
990 virtual server or with an NFS or SAMBA share. Clients
991 typically only make 2 connections to a single server at a
992 time <http://ur1.ca/6ih>, so this can parallelize the job.
998 For configuring the public stream.
1000 localonly: If set to true, only messages posted by users of this
1001 service (rather than other services, filtered through OMB)
1002 are shown in the public stream. Default true.
1003 blacklist: An array of IDs of users to hide from the public stream.
1004 Useful if you have someone making excessive Twitterfeed posts
1005 to the site, other kinds of automated posts, testing bots, etc.
1010 server: Like avatars, you can speed up page loading by pointing the
1011 theme file lookup to another server (virtual or real). The
1012 theme server's root path should map to the Laconica "theme"
1013 subdirectory. Defaults to NULL.
1018 For configuring the XMPP sub-system.
1020 enabled: Whether to accept and send messages by XMPP. Default false.
1021 server: server part of XMPP ID for update user.
1022 port: connection port for clients. Default 5222, which you probably
1023 shouldn't need to change.
1024 user: username for the client connection. Users will receive messages
1025 from 'user'@'server'.
1026 resource: a unique identifier for the connection to the server. This
1027 is actually used as a prefix for each XMPP component in the system.
1028 password: password for the user account.
1029 host: some XMPP domains are served by machines with a different
1030 hostname. (For example, @gmail.com GTalk users connect to
1031 talk.google.com). Set this to the correct hostname if that's the
1032 case with your server.
1033 encryption: Whether to encrypt the connection between Laconica and the
1034 XMPP server. Defaults to true, but you can get
1035 considerably better performance turning it off if you're
1036 connecting to a server on the same machine or on a
1038 debug: if turned on, this will make the XMPP library blurt out all of
1039 the incoming and outgoing messages as XML stanzas. Use as a
1040 last resort, and never turn it on if you don't have queues
1041 enabled, since it will spit out sensitive data to the browser.
1042 public: an array of JIDs to send _all_ notices to. This is useful for
1043 participating in third-party search and archiving services.
1048 Miscellaneous tagging stuff.
1050 dropoff: Decay factor for tag listing, in seconds.
1051 Defaults to exponential decay over ten days; you can twiddle
1052 with it to try and get better results for your site.
1057 For daemon processes.
1059 piddir: directory that daemon processes should write their PID file
1060 (process ID) to. Defaults to /var/run/, which is where this
1061 stuff should usually go on Unix-ish systems.
1062 user: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective user ID
1063 to this user before running. Probably a good idea, especially if
1064 you start the daemons as root. Note: user name, like 'daemon',
1066 group: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective group ID
1067 to this named group. Again, a name, not a numerical ID.
1072 You can get a significant boost in performance by caching some
1073 database data in memcached <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>.
1075 enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
1076 server: a string with the hostname of the memcached server. Can also
1077 be an array of hostnames, if you've got more than one server.
1082 You can get a significant boost in performance using Sphinx Search
1083 instead of your database server to search for users and notices.
1084 <http://sphinxsearch.com/>.
1086 enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
1087 server: a string with the hostname of the sphinx server.
1088 port: an integer with the port number of the sphinx server.
1093 A catch-all for integration with other systems.
1095 source: The name to use for the source of posts to Twitter. Defaults
1096 to 'laconica', but if you request your own source name from
1097 Twitter <http://twitter.com/help/request_source>, you can use
1098 that here instead. Status updates on Twitter will then have
1106 enabled: A three-valued flag for whether to use notice inboxes (see
1107 upgrading info above for notes about this change). Can be
1108 'false', 'true', or '"transitional"'.
1113 For notice-posting throttles.
1115 enabled: Whether to throttle posting. Defaults to false.
1116 count: Each user can make this many posts in 'timespan' seconds. So, if count
1117 is 100 and timespan is 3600, then there can be only 100 posts
1118 from a user every hour.
1119 timespan: see 'count'.
1126 banned: an array of usernames and/or profile IDs of 'banned' profiles.
1127 The site will reject any notices by these users -- they will
1128 not be accepted at all. (Compare with blacklisted users above,
1129 whose posts just won't show up in the public stream.)
1134 The primary output for Laconica is syslog, unless you configured a
1135 separate logfile. This is probably the first place to look if you're
1136 getting weird behaviour from Laconica.
1138 If you're tracking the unstable version of Laconica in the git
1139 repository (see below), and you get a compilation error ("unexpected
1140 T_STRING") in the browser, check to see that you don't have any
1141 conflicts in your code.
1143 If you upgraded to Laconica 0.7.1 without reading the "Notice inboxes"
1144 section above, and all your users' 'Personal' tabs are empty, read the
1145 "Notice inboxes" section above.
1150 These are some myths you may see on the Web about Laconica.
1151 Documentation from the core team about Laconica has been pretty
1152 sparse, so some backtracking and guesswork resulted in some incorrect
1155 - "Set $config['db']['debug'] = 5 to debug the database." This is an
1156 extremely bad idea. It's a tool built into DB_DataObject that will
1157 emit oodles of print lines directly to the browser of your users.
1158 Among these lines will be your database username and password. Do
1159 not enable this option on a production Web site for any reason.
1161 - "Edit dataobject.ini with the following settings..." dataobject.ini
1162 is a development file for the DB_DataObject framework and is not
1163 used by the running software. It was removed from the Laconica
1164 distribution because its presence was confusing. Do not bother
1165 configuring dataobject.ini, and do not put your database username
1166 and password into the file on a production Web server; unscrupulous
1167 persons may try to read it to get your passwords.
1172 If you're adventurous or impatient, you may want to install the
1173 development version of Laconica. To get it, use the git version
1174 control tool <http://git-scm.com/> like so:
1176 git clone http://laconi.ca/software/laconica.git
1178 To keep it up-to-date, use 'git pull'. Watch for conflicts!
1183 There are several ways to get more information about Laconica.
1185 * There is a mailing list for Laconica developers and admins at
1186 http://mail.laconi.ca/mailman/listinfo/laconica-dev
1187 * The #laconica IRC channel on freenode.net <http://www.freenode.net/>.
1188 * The Laconica wiki, http://laconi.ca/trac/
1193 * Microblogging messages to http://identi.ca/evan are very welcome.
1194 * Laconica's Trac server has a bug tracker for any defects you may find,
1195 or ideas for making things better. http://laconi.ca/trac/
1196 * e-mail to evan@identi.ca will usually be read and responded to very
1197 quickly, unless the question is really hard.
1202 The following is an incomplete list of developers who've worked on
1203 Laconi.ca. Apologies for any oversight; please let evan@identi.ca know
1204 if anyone's been overlooked in error.
1206 * Evan Prodromou, founder and lead developer, Control Yourself, Inc.
1207 * Zach Copley, Control Yourself, Inc.
1208 * Earle Martin, Control Yourself, Inc.
1209 * Marie-Claude Doyon, designer, Control Yourself, Inc.
1210 * Sarven Capadisli, Control Yourself, Inc.
1211 * Robin Millette, Control Yourself, Inc.
1222 * Tryggvi Björgvinsson
1226 * Ken Sheppardson (Trac server, man-about-town)
1227 * Tiago 'gouki' Faria (i18n managerx)
1230 Thanks also to the developers of our upstream library code and to the
1231 thousands of people who have tried out Identi.ca, installed Laconi.ca,
1232 told their friends, and built the Open Microblogging network to what