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 - Users can 'nudge' each other, in case they want to say 'hi' without
84 - Support SUP protocol
85 (http://code.google.com/p/simpleupdateprotocol/) for quicker updates
86 to FriendFeed (http://friendfeed.com/).
87 - Tag streams now have an RSS feed.
88 - CSRF protection for posting notices and logging in. This closes
89 the "Version 0 API" used initially for identi.ca and supported
90 until September 30, 2008.
91 - Slightly broadened the layout of default and Identi.ca themes to
92 accommodate more verbose (non-English!) languages' interfaces.
93 - Replies made through the Web site will refer to the clicked-on
95 - enjit queue handler.
96 - Experimental theme for iphone use.
97 - Various internationalization scripts and updates.
98 - Better UTF-8 escaped entity handling in API.
99 - Better handling of since_id and before_id parameters in API.
100 - Better heuristics for when to include a closing parenthesis in a link.
101 - Handle multi-byte-encoded @-replies from XMPP through Twitter bridge.
102 - Better handling of read-only requests in API, to allow using
103 replicated mirror servers.
104 - A lot of common code factored out of default and identi.ca themes;
105 default theme now much more functional.
106 - 'Invite-only' mode for closed sites.
107 - Some undocumented features in Twitter API user/show.
108 - Favorites flag in API for statuses.
110 Because of the CSRF fixes in particular, this upgrade is recommended
111 for all Laconica sites.
116 The following software packages are *required* for this software to
119 - PHP 5.2.x. It may be possible to run this software on earlier
120 versions of PHP, but many of the functions used are only available
122 - MySQL 5.x. The Laconica database is stored, by default, in a MySQL
123 server. It has been primarily tested on 5.x servers, although it may
124 be possible to install on earlier (or later!) versions. The server
125 *must* support the MyISAM storage engine -- the default for most
126 MySQL servers -- *and* the InnoDB storage engine.
127 - A Web server. Preferably, you should have Apache 2.2.x with the
128 mod_rewrite extension installed and enabled.
130 Your PHP installation must include the following PHP extensions:
132 - Curl. This is for fetching files by HTTP.
133 - XMLWriter. This is for formatting XML and HTML output.
134 - MySQL. For accessing the database.
135 - GD. For scaling down avatar images.
136 - mbstring. For handling Unicode (UTF-8) encoded strings.
138 For some functionality, you will also need the following extensions:
140 - Memcache. A client for the memcached server, which caches database
141 information in volatile memory. This is important for adequate
142 performance on high-traffic sites. You will also need a memcached
143 server to store the data in.
144 - Mailparse. Efficient parsing of email requires this extension.
145 Submission by email or SMS-over-email uses this extension.
147 You will almost definitely get 2-3 times better performance from your
148 site if you install a PHP bytecode cache/accelerator. Some well-known
149 examples are: eaccelerator, Turck mmcache, xcache, apc. Zend Optimizer
150 is a proprietary accelerator installed on some hosting sites.
155 A number of external PHP libraries are used to provide basic
156 functionality and optional functionality for your system. For your
157 convenience, they are available in the "extlib" directory of this
158 package, and you do not have to download and install them. However,
159 you may want to keep them up-to-date with the latest upstream version,
160 and the URLs are listed here for your convenience.
162 - DB_DataObject http://pear.php.net/package/DB_DataObject
163 - Validate http://pear.php.net/package/Validate
164 - OpenID from OpenIDEnabled (not the PEAR version!). We decided
165 to use the openidenabled.com version since it's more widely
166 implemented, and seems to be better supported.
167 http://openidenabled.com/php-openid/
168 - PEAR DB. Although this is an older data access system (new
169 packages should probably use PHP DBO), the OpenID libraries
170 depend on PEAR DB so we use it here, too. DB_DataObject can
171 also use PEAR MDB2, which may give you better performance
172 but won't work with OpenID.
173 http://pear.php.net/package/DB
174 - OAuth.php from http://oauth.googlecode.com/svn/code/php/
175 - markdown.php from http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/
176 - PEAR Mail, for sending out mail notifications
177 http://pear.php.net/package/Mail
178 - PEAR Net_SMTP, if you use the SMTP factory for notifications
179 http://pear.php.net/package/Net_SMTP
180 - PEAR Net_Socket, if you use the SMTP factory for notifications
181 http://pear.php.net/package/Net_Socket
182 - XMPPHP, the follow-up to Class.Jabber.php. Probably the best XMPP
183 library available for PHP. http://xmpphp.googlecode.com/. Note that
184 as of this writing the version of this library that is available in
185 the extlib directory is *significantly different* from the upstream
186 version (patches have been submitted). Upgrading to the upstream
187 version may render your Laconica site unable to send or receive XMPP
190 A design goal of Laconica is that the basic Web functionality should
191 work on even the most restrictive commercial hosting services.
192 However, additional functionality, such as receiving messages by
193 Jabber/GTalk, require that you be able to run long-running processes
194 on your account. In addition, posting by email or from SMS require
195 that you be able to install a mail filter in your mail server.
200 Installing the basic Laconica Web component is relatively easy,
201 especially if you've previously installed PHP/MySQL packages.
203 1. Unpack the tarball you downloaded on your Web server. Usually a
204 command like this will work:
206 tar zxf laconica-0.6.2.tar.gz
208 ...which will make a laconica-0.6.2 subdirectory in your current
209 directory. (If you don't have shell access on your Web server, you
210 may have to unpack the tarball on your local computer and FTP the
211 files to the server.)
213 2. Move the tarball to a directory of your choosing in your Web root
214 directory. Usually something like this will work:
216 mv laconica-0.6.2 /var/www/mublog
218 This will make your Laconica instance available in the mublog path of
219 your server, like "http://example.net/mublog". "microblog" or
220 "laconica" might also be good path names. If you know how to
221 configure virtual hosts on your web server, you can try setting up
222 "http://micro.example.net/" or the like.
224 3. You should also take this moment to make your avatar subdirectory
225 writeable by the Web server. An insecure way to do this is:
227 chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/avatar
229 On some systems, this will probably work:
231 chgrp www-data /var/www/mublog/avatar
232 chmod g+w /var/www/mublog/avatar
234 If your Web server runs as another user besides "www-data", try
235 that user's default group instead. As a last resort, you can create
236 a new group like "avatar" and add the Web server's user to the group.
238 4. Create a database to hold your microblog data. Something like this
241 mysqladmin -u "username" --password="password" create laconica
243 Note that Laconica must have its own database; you can't share the
244 database with another program. You can name it whatever you want,
247 (If you don't have shell access to your server, you may need to use
248 a tool like PHPAdmin to create a database. Check your hosting
249 service's documentation for how to create a new MySQL database.)
251 5. Run the laconica.sql SQL script in the db subdirectory to create
252 the database tables in the database. A typical system would work
255 mysql -u "username" --password="password" laconica < /var/www/mublog/db/laconica.sql
257 You may want to test by logging into the database and checking that
258 the tables were created. Here's an example:
262 6. Create a new database account that Laconica will use to access the
263 database. If you have shell access, this will probably work from the
266 GRANT SELECT,INSERT,DELETE,UPDATE on laconica.*
267 TO 'lacuser'@'localhost'
268 IDENTIFIED BY 'lacpassword';
270 You should change 'lacuser' and 'lacpassword' to your preferred new
271 username and password. You may want to test logging in as this new
272 user and testing that you can SELECT from some of the tables in the
273 DB (use SHOW TABLES to see which ones are there).
275 7. Copy the config.php.sample in the Laconica directory to config.php.
277 8. Edit config.php to set the basic configuration for your system.
278 (See descriptions below for basic config options.) Note that there
279 are lots of options and if you try to do them all at once, you will
280 have a hard time making sure what's working and what's not. So,
281 stick with the basics at first. In particular, customizing the
282 'site' and 'db' settings will almost definitely be needed.
284 9. At this point, you should be able to navigate in a browser to your
285 microblog's main directory and see the "Public Timeline", which
286 will be empty. If not, magic has happened! You can now register a
287 new user, post some notices, edit your profile, etc. However, you
288 may want to wait to do that stuff if you think you can set up
289 "fancy URLs" (see below), since some URLs are stored in the database.
294 By default, Laconica will have big long sloppy URLs that are hard for
295 people to remember or use. For example, a user's home profile might be
298 http://example.org/mublog/index.php?action=showstream&nickname=fred
300 It's possible to configure the software so it looks like this instead:
302 http://example.org/mublog/fred
304 These "fancy URLs" are more readable and memorable for users. To use
305 fancy URLs, you must either have Apache 2.2.x with .htaccess enabled
306 and mod_redirect enabled, -OR- know how to configure "url redirection"
309 1. Copy the htaccess.sample file to .htaccess in your Laconica
310 directory. Note: if you have control of your server's httpd.conf or
311 similar configuration files, it can greatly improve performance to
312 import the .htaccess file into your conf file instead. If you're
313 not sure how to do it, you may save yourself a lot of headache by
314 just leaving the .htaccess file.
316 2. Change the "RewriteBase" in the new .htaccess file to be the URL path
317 to your Laconica installation on your server. Typically this will
318 be the path to your Laconica directory relative to your Web root.
320 3. Add or uncomment or change a line in your config.php file so it says:
322 $config['site']['fancy'] = true;
324 You should now be able to navigate to a "fancy" URL on your server,
327 http://example.net/mublog/main/register
329 If you changed your HTTP server configuration, you may need to restart
332 If you have problems with the .htaccess file on versions of Apache
333 earlier than 2.2.x, try changing the regular expressions in the
334 htaccess.sample file that use "\w" to just use ".".
339 Laconica supports a cheap-and-dirty system for sending update messages
340 to mobile phones and for receiving updates from the mobile. Instead of
341 sending through the SMS network itself, which is costly and requires
342 buy-in from the wireless carriers, it simply piggybacks on the email
343 gateways that many carriers provide to their customers. So, SMS
344 configuration is essentially email configuration.
346 Each user sends to a made-up email address, which they keep a secret.
347 Incoming email that is "From" the user's SMS email address, and "To"
348 the users' secret email address on the site's domain, will be
349 converted to a message and stored in the DB.
351 For this to work, there *must* be a domain or sub-domain for which all
352 (or most) incoming email can pass through the incoming mail filter.
354 1. Run the SQL script carrier.sql in your Laconica database. This will
357 mysql -u "lacuser" --password="lacpassword" laconica < db/carrier.sql
359 This will populate your database with a list of wireless carriers
360 that support email SMS gateways.
362 2. Make sure the maildaemon.php file is executable:
364 chmod +x scripts/maildaemon.php
366 Note that "daemon" is kind of a misnomer here; the script is more
367 of a filter than a daemon.
369 2. Edit /etc/aliases on your mail server and add the following line:
371 *: /path/to/laconica/scripts/maildaemon.php
373 3. Run whatever code you need to to update your aliases database. For
374 many mail servers (Postfix, Exim, Sendmail), this should work:
378 You may need to restart your mail server for the new database to
381 4. Set the following in your config.php file:
383 $config['mail']['domain'] = 'yourdomain.example.net';
385 At this point, post-by-email and post-by-SMS-gateway should work. Note
386 that if your mail server is on a different computer from your email
387 server, you'll need to have a full installation of Laconica, a working
388 config.php, and access to the Laconica database from the mail server.
393 XMPP (eXtended Message and Presence Protocol, http://xmpp.org/) is the
394 instant-messenger protocol that drives Jabber and GTalk IM. You can
395 distribute messages via XMPP using the system below; however, you
396 need to run the XMPP incoming daemon to allow incoming messages as
399 1. You may want to strongly consider setting up your own XMPP server.
400 Ejabberd, OpenFire, and JabberD are all Open Source servers.
401 Jabber, Inc. provides a high-performance commercial server.
403 2. You must register a Jabber ID (JID) with your new server. It helps
404 to choose a name like "update@example.com" or "notice" or something
405 similar. Alternately, your "update JID" can be registered on a
406 publicly-available XMPP service, like jabber.org or GTalk.
408 Laconica will not register the JID with your chosen XMPP server;
409 you need to do this manually, with an XMPP client like Gajim,
410 Telepathy, or Pidgin.im.
412 3. Configure your site's XMPP variables, as described below in the
413 configuration section.
415 On a default installation, your site can broadcast messages using
416 XMPP. Users won't be able to post messages using XMPP unless you've
417 got the XMPP daemon running. See 'Queues and daemons' below for how
418 to set that up. Also, once you have a sizable number of users, sending
419 a lot of SMS, OMB, and XMPP messages whenever someone posts a message
420 can really slow down your site; it may cause posting to timeout.
422 NOTE: stream_select(), a crucial function for network programming, is
423 broken on PHP 5.2.x less than 5.2.6 on amd64-based servers. We don't
424 work around this bug in Laconica; current recommendation is to move
425 off of amd64 to another server.
430 You can send *all* messages from your microblogging site to a
431 third-party service using XMPP. This can be useful for providing
432 search, indexing, bridging, or other cool services.
434 To configure a downstream site to receive your public stream, add
435 their "JID" (Jabber ID) to your config.php as follows:
437 $config['xmpp']['public'][] = 'downstream@example.net';
439 (Don't miss those square brackets at the end.) Note that your XMPP
440 broadcasting must be configured as mentioned above. Although you can
441 send out messages at "Web time", high-volume sites should strongly
442 consider setting up queues and daemons.
447 Some activities that Laconica needs to do, like broadcast OMB, SMS,
448 and XMPP messages, can be 'queued' and done by off-line bots instead.
449 For this to work, you must be able to run long-running offline
450 processes, either on your main Web server or on another server you
451 control. (Your other server will still need all the above
452 prerequisites, with the exception of Apache.) Installing on a separate
453 server is probably a good idea for high-volume sites.
455 1. You'll need the "CLI" (command-line interface) version of PHP
456 installed on whatever server you use.
458 2. If you're using a separate server for queues, install Laconica
459 somewhere on the server. You don't need to worry about the
460 .htaccess file, but make sure that your config.php file is close
461 to, or identical to, your Web server's version.
463 3. In your config.php files (both the Web server and the queues
464 server!), set the following variable:
466 $config['queue']['enabled'] = true;
468 You may also want to look at the 'daemon' section of this file for
469 more daemon options. Note that if you set the 'user' and/or 'group'
470 options, you'll need to create that user and/or group by hand.
471 They're not created automatically.
473 4. On the queues server, run the command scripts/startdaemons.sh. It
474 needs as a parameter the install path; if you run it from the
475 Laconica dir, "." should suffice.
477 This will run six (for now) queue handlers:
479 * xmppdaemon.php - listens for new XMPP messages from users and stores
480 them as notices in the database.
481 * jabberqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
482 registered users who should receive them.
483 * publicqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
484 public feed listeners.
485 * ombqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to OpenMicroBlogging
486 recipients on foreign servers.
487 * smsqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to SMS-over-email addresses
489 * xmppconfirmhandler.php - sends confirmation messages to registered
492 Note that these queue daemons are pretty raw, and need your care. In
493 particular, they leak memory, and you may want to restart them on a
494 regular (daily or so) basis with a cron job. Also, if they lose
495 the connection to the XMPP server for too long, they'll simply die. It
496 may be a good idea to use a daemon-monitoring service, like 'monit',
497 to check their status and keep them running.
499 All the daemons write their process IDs (pids) to /var/run/ by
500 default. This can be useful for starting, stopping, and monitoring the
506 Sitemap files (http://sitemaps.org/) are a very nice way of telling
507 search engines and other interested bots what's available on your site
508 and what's changed recently. You can generate sitemap files for your
511 1. Choose your sitemap URL layout. Laconica creates a number of
512 sitemap XML files for different parts of your site. You may want to
513 put these in a sub-directory of your Laconica directory to avoid
514 clutter. The sitemap index file tells the search engines and other
515 bots where to find all the sitemap files; it *must* be in the main
516 installation directory or higher. Both types of file must be
517 available through HTTP.
519 2. To generate your sitemaps, run the following command on your server:
521 php scripts/sitemap.php -f index-file-path -d sitemap-directory -u URL-prefix-for-sitemaps
523 Here, index-file-path is the full path to the sitemap index file,
524 like './sitemapindex.xml'. sitemap-directory is the directory where
525 you want the sitemaps stored, like './sitemaps/' (make sure the dir
526 exists). URL-prefix-for-sitemaps is the full URL for the sitemap dir,
527 typically something like 'http://example.net/mublog/sitemaps/'.
529 You can use several methods for submitting your sitemap index to
530 search engines to get your site indexed. One is to add a line like the
531 following to your robots.txt file:
533 Sitemap: /mublog/sitemapindex.xml
535 This is a good idea for letting *all* Web spiders know about your
536 sitemap. You can also submit sitemap files to major search engines
537 using their respective "Webmaster centres"; see sitemaps.org for links
543 There are two themes shipped with this version of Laconica: "stoica",
544 which is what the Identi.ca site uses, and "default", which is a good
545 basis for other sites.
547 As of right now, your ability to change the theme is site-wide; users
548 can't choose their own theme. Additionally, the only thing you can
549 change in the theme is CSS stylesheets and some image files; you can't
550 change the HTML output, like adding or removing menu items.
552 You can choose a theme using the $config['site']['theme'] element in
553 the config.php file. See below for details.
555 You can add your own theme by making a sub-directory of the 'theme'
556 subdirectory with the name of your theme. Each theme can have the
559 display.css: a CSS2 file for "default" styling for all browsers.
560 ie6.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
562 ie7.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
564 logo.png: a logo image for the site.
565 default-avatar-profile.png: a 96x96 pixel image to use as the avatar for
566 users who don't upload their own.
567 default-avatar-stream.png: Ditto, but 48x48. For streams of notices.
568 default-avatar-mini.png: Ditto ditto, but 24x24. For subscriptions
569 listing on profile pages.
571 You may want to start by copying the files from the default theme to
577 Translations in Laconica use the gettext system (http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/).
578 Theoretically, you can add your own sub-directory to the locale/
579 subdirectory to add a new language to your system. You'll need to
580 compile the ".po" files into ".mo" files, however.
582 Contributions of translation information to Laconica are very easy:
583 you can use the Web interface at http://laconi.ca/entrans/ to add one
584 or a few or lots of new translations -- or even new languages. You can
585 also download more up-to-date .po files there, if you so desire.
590 There is no builtin system for doing backups in Laconica. You can make
591 backups of a working Laconica system by backing up the database and
592 the Web directory. To backup the database use mysqldump (http://ur1.ca/7xo)
593 and to backup the Web directory, try tar.
598 If you've been using Laconica 0.6, 0.5 or lower, or if you've been
599 tracking the "darcs" version of the software, you will probably want
600 to upgrade and keep your existing data. There is no automated upgrade
601 procedure in Laconica 0.6.2. Try these step-by-step instructions; read
602 to the end first before trying them.
604 0. Download Laconica and set up all the prerequisites as if you were
606 1. Make backups of both your database and your Web directory. UNDER NO
607 CIRCUMSTANCES should you try to do an upgrade without a known-good
608 backup. You have been warned.
609 2. Shut down Web access to your site, either by turning off your Web
610 server or by redirecting all pages to a "sorry, under maintenance"
612 3. Shut down XMPP access to your site, typically by shutting down the
613 xmppdaemon.php process and all other daemons that you're running.
614 If you've got "monit" or "cron" automatically restarting your
615 daemons, make sure to turn that off, too.
616 4. Shut down SMS and email access to your site. The easy way to do
617 this is to comment out the line piping incoming email to your
618 maildaemon.php file, and running something like "newaliases".
619 5. Once all writing processes to your site are turned off, make a
620 final backup of the Web directory and database.
621 6. Move your Laconica directory to a backup spot, like "mublog.bak".
622 7. Unpack your Laconica 0.6 tarball and move it to "mublog" or
623 wherever your code used to be.
624 8. Copy the config.php file and avatar directory from your old
625 directory to your new directory.
626 9. Copy htaccess.sample to .htaccess in the new directory. Change the
627 RewriteBase to use the correct path.
628 10. Rebuild the database. Go to your Laconica directory and run the
629 rebuilddb.sh script like this:
631 ./scripts/rebuilddb.sh rootuser rootpassword database db/laconica.sql
633 Here, rootuser and rootpassword are the username and password for a
634 user who can drop and create databases as well as tables; typically
635 that's _not_ the user Laconica runs as.
636 11. Use mysql client to log into your database and make sure that the
637 notice, user, profile, subscription etc. tables are non-empty.
638 12. Turn back on the Web server, and check that things still work.
639 13. Turn back on XMPP bots and email maildaemon. Note that the XMPP
640 bots have changed since version 0.5; see above for details.
642 If you're upgrading from very old versions, you may want to look at
643 the fixup_* scripts in the scripts directories. These will store some
644 precooked data in the DB. All upgraders should check out the inboxes
647 NOTE: the database definition file, stoica.ini, has been renamed to
648 laconica.ini (since this is the recommended database name). If you
649 have a line in your config.php pointing to the old name, you'll need
655 Before version 0.6.2, the page showing all notices from people the
656 user is subscribed to ("so-and-so with friends") was calculated at run
657 time. Starting with 0.6.2, we have a new data structure for holding a
658 user's "notice inbox". (Note: distinct from the "message inbox", which
659 is the "inbox" tab in the UI. The notice inbox appears under the
662 Notices are added to the inbox when they're created. This speeds up
663 the query considerably, and also allows us the opportunity, in the
664 future, to add different kind of notices to an inbox -- like @-replies
665 or subscriptions to search terms or hashtags.
667 Notice inboxes are enabled by default for new installations. If you
668 are upgrading an existing site, this means that your users will see
669 empty "Personal" pages. The following steps will help you fix the
672 0. $config['inboxes']['enabled'] can be set to one of three values. If
673 you set it to 'false', the site will work as before. Support for this
674 will probably be dropped in future versions.
675 1. Setting the flag to 'transitional' means that you're in transition.
676 In this mode, the code will run the "new query" or the "old query"
677 based on whether the user's inbox has been updated.
678 2. After setting the flag to "transitional", you can run the
679 fixup_inboxes.php script to create the inboxes. You may want to set
680 the memory limit high. You can re-run it without ill effect.
681 3. When fixup_inboxes is finished, you can set the enabled flag to
684 Configuration options
685 =====================
687 The sole configuration file for Laconica (excepting configurations for
688 dependency software) is config.php in your Laconica directory. If you
689 edit any other file in the directory, like lib/common.php (where most
690 of the defaults are defined), you will lose your configuration options
691 in any upgrade, and you will wish that you had been more careful.
693 Almost all configuration options are made through a two-dimensional
694 associative array, cleverly named $config. A typical configuration
697 $config['section']['option'] = value;
699 For brevity, the following documentation describes each section and
705 This section is a catch-all for site-wide variables.
707 name: the name of your site, like 'YourCompany Microblog'.
708 server: the server part of your site's URLs, like 'example.net'.
709 path: The path part of your site's URLs, like 'mublog' or '/'
711 fancy: whether or not your site uses fancy URLs (see Fancy URLs
712 section above). Default is false.
713 logfile: full path to a file for Laconica to save logging
714 information to. You may want to use this if you don't have
716 locale_path: full path to the directory for locale data. Unless you
717 store all your locale data in one place, you probably
718 don't need to use this.
719 language: default language for your site. Defaults to US English.
720 languages: A list of languages supported on your site. Typically you'd
721 only change this if you wanted to disable support for one
723 "unset($config['site']['languages']['de'])" will disable
725 theme: Theme for your site (see Theme section). Two themes are
726 provided by default: 'default' and 'stoica' (the one used by
727 Identi.ca). It's appreciated if you don't use the 'stoica' theme
728 except as the basis for your own.
729 email: contact email address for your site. By default, it's extracted
730 from your Web server environment; you may want to customize it.
731 broughtbyurl: name of an organization or individual who provides the
732 service. Each page will include a link to this name in the
733 footer. A good way to link to the blog, forum, wiki,
734 corporate portal, or whoever is making the service available.
735 broughtby: text used for the "brought by" link.
736 timezone: default timezone for message display. Users can set their
737 own time zone. Defaults to 'UTC', which is a pretty good default.
738 closed: If set to 'true', will disallow registration on your site.
739 This is a cheap way to restrict accounts to only one
740 individual or group; just register the accounts you want on
741 the service, *then* set this variable to 'true'.
742 inviteonly: If set to 'true', will only allow registration if the user
743 was invited by an existing user.
748 This section is a reference to the configuration options for
749 DB_DataObject (see http://ur1.ca/7xp). The ones that you may want to
750 set are listed below for clarity.
752 database: a DSN (Data Source Name) for your Laconica database. This is
753 in the format 'protocol://username:password@hostname/databasename',
754 where 'protocol' is 'mysql' (or possibly 'postgresql', if you
755 really know what you're doing), 'username' is the username,
756 'password' is the password, and etc.
757 ini_yourdbname: if your database is not named 'laconica', you'll need
758 to set this to point to the location of the
759 laconica.ini file. Note that the real name of your database
760 should go in there, not literally 'yourdbname'.
761 db_driver: You can try changing this to 'MDB2' to use the other driver
762 type for DB_DataObject, but note that it breaks the OpenID
763 libraries, which only support PEAR::DB.
764 debug: On a database error, you may get a message saying to set this
765 value to 5 to see debug messages in the browser. This breaks
766 just about all pages, and will also expose the username and
768 quote_identifiers: Set this to true if you're using postgresql.
769 type: either 'mysql' or 'postgresql' (used for some bits of
770 database-type-specific SQL in the code). Defaults to mysql.
771 mirror: you can set this to an array of DSNs, like the above
772 'database' value. If it's set, certain read-only actions will
773 use a random value out of this array for the database, rather
774 than the one in 'database' (actually, 'database' is overwritten).
775 You can offload a busy DB server by setting up MySQL replication
776 and adding the slaves to this array. Note that if you want some
777 requests to go to the 'database' (master) server, you'll need
778 to include it in this array, too.
783 By default, Laconica sites log error messages to the syslog facility.
784 (You can override this using the 'logfile' parameter described above).
786 appname: The name that Laconica uses to log messages. By default it's
787 "laconica", but if you have more than one installation on the
788 server, you may want to change the name for each instance so
789 you can track log messages more easily.
794 You can configure the software to queue time-consuming tasks, like
795 sending out SMS email or XMPP messages, for off-line processing. See
796 'Queues and daemons' above for how to set this up.
798 enabled: Whether to uses queues. Defaults to false.
803 The default license to use for your users notices. The default is the
804 Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which is probably the right
805 choice for any public site. Note that some other servers will not
806 accept notices if you apply a stricter license than this.
808 url: URL of the license, used for links.
809 title: Title for the license, like 'Creative Commons Attribution 3.0'.
810 image: A button shown on each page for the license.
815 This is for configuring out-going email. We use PEAR's Mail module,
816 see: http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.mail.mail.factory.php
818 backend: the backend to use for mail, one of 'mail', 'sendmail', and
819 'smtp'. Defaults to PEAR's default, 'mail'.
820 params: if the mail backend requires any parameters, you can provide
821 them in an associative array.
826 This is for configuring nicknames in the service.
828 blacklist: an array of strings for usernames that may not be
829 registered. A default array exists for strings that are
830 used by Laconica (e.g. 'doc', 'main', 'avatar', 'theme')
831 but you may want to add others if you have other software
832 installed in a subdirectory of Laconica or if you just
833 don't want certain words used as usernames.
838 For configuring avatar access.
840 server: If set, defines another server where avatars are stored in the
841 root directory. Note that the 'avatar' subdir still has to be
842 writeable. You'd typically use this to split HTTP requests on
843 the client to speed up page loading, either with another
844 virtual server or with an NFS or SAMBA share. Clients
845 typically only make 2 connections to a single server at a
846 time (http://ur1.ca/6ih), so this can parallelize the job.
852 For configuring the public stream.
854 localonly: If set to true, only messages posted by users of this
855 service (rather than other services, filtered through OMB)
856 are shown in the public stream. Default true.
861 server: Like avatars, you can speed up page loading by pointing the
862 theme file lookup to another server (virtual or real). The
863 theme server's root path should map to the Laconica "theme"
864 subdirectory. Defaults to NULL.
869 For configuring the XMPP sub-system.
871 enabled: Whether to accept and send messages by XMPP. Default false.
872 server: server part of XMPP ID for update user.
873 port: connection port for clients. Default 5222, which you probably
874 shouldn't need to change.
875 user: username for the client connection. Users will receive messages
876 from 'user'@'server'.
877 resource: a unique identifier for the connection to the server. This
878 is actually used as a prefix for each XMPP component in the system.
879 password: password for the user account.
880 host: some XMPP domains are served by machines with a different
881 hostname. (For example, @gmail.com GTalk users connect to
882 talk.google.com). Set this to the correct hostname if that's the
883 case with your server.
884 encryption: Whether to encrypt the connection between Laconica and the
885 XMPP server. Defaults to true, but you can get
886 considerably better performance turning it off if you're
887 connecting to a server on the same machine or on a
889 debug: if turned on, this will make the XMPP library blurt out all of
890 the incoming and outgoing messages as XML stanzas. Use as a
891 last resort, and never turn it on if you don't have queues
892 enabled, since it will spit out sensitive data to the browser.
893 public: an array of JIDs to send _all_ notices to. This is useful for
894 participating in third-party search and archiving services.
899 Miscellaneous tagging stuff.
901 dropoff: Decay factor for tag listing, in seconds.
902 Defaults to exponential decay over ten days; you can twiddle
903 with it to try and get better results for your site.
908 For daemon processes.
910 piddir: directory that daemon processes should write their PID file
911 (process ID) to. Defaults to /var/run/, which is where this
912 stuff should usually go on Unix-ish systems.
913 user: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective user ID
914 to this user before running. Probably a good idea, especially if
915 you start the daemons as root. Note: user name, like 'daemon',
917 group: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective group ID
918 to this named group. Again, a name, not a numerical ID.
923 You can get a significant boost in performance by caching some
924 database data in memcached (http://www.danga.com/memcached/).
926 enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
927 server: a string with the hostname of the memcached server. Can also
928 be an array of hostnames, if you've got more than one server.
933 A catch-all for integration with other systems.
935 source: The name to use for the source of posts to Twitter. Defaults
936 to 'laconica', but if you request your own source name from
937 Twitter (http://twitter.com/help/request_source), you can use
938 that here instead. Status updates on Twitter will then have
946 enabled: A three-valued flag for whether to use notice inboxes (see
947 upgrading info above for notes about this change). Can be
948 'false', 'true', or '"transitional"'.
953 The primary output for Laconica is syslog, unless you configured a
954 separate logfile. This is probably the first place to look if you're
955 getting weird behaviour from Laconica.
957 If you're tracking the unstable version of Laconica in the darcs
958 repository (see below), and you get a compilation error ("unexpected
959 T_STRING") in the browser, check to see that you don't have any
960 conflicts in your code.
962 If you upgraded to Laconica 0.6.2 without reading the "Notice inboxes"
963 section above, and all your users' 'Personal' tabs are empty, read the
964 "Notice inboxes" section above.
969 These are some myths you may see on the Web about Laconica.
970 Documentation from the core team about Laconica has been pretty
971 sparse, so some backtracking and guesswork resulted in some incorrect
974 - "Set $config['db']['debug'] = 5 to debug the database." This is an
975 extremely bad idea. It's a tool built into DB_DataObject that will
976 emit oodles of print lines directly to the browser of your users.
977 Among these lines will be your database username and password. Do
978 not enable this option on a production Web site for any reason.
980 - "Edit dataobject.ini with the following settings..." dataobject.ini
981 is a development file for the DB_DataObject framework and is not
982 used by the running software. It was removed from the Laconica
983 distribution because its presence was confusing. Do not bother
984 configuring dataobject.ini, and do not put your database username
985 and password into the file on a production Web server; unscrupulous
986 persons may try to read it to get your passwords.
991 If you're adventurous or impatient, you may want to install the
992 development version of Laconica. To get it, use the darcs version
993 control tool (http://darcs.net/) like so:
995 darcs get http://laconi.ca/darcs/ mublog
997 To keep it up-to-date, use 'darcs pull'. Watch for conflicts!
1002 There are several ways to get more information about Laconica.
1004 * There is a mailing list for Laconica developers and admins at
1005 http://mail.laconi.ca/mailman/listinfo/laconica-dev
1006 * The #laconica IRC channel on freenode.net (http://www.freenode.net/).
1007 * The Laconica wiki, http://laconi.ca/trac/
1012 * Microblogging messages to http://identi.ca/evan are very welcome.
1013 * Laconica's Trac server has a bug tracker for any defects you may find,
1014 or ideas for making things better. http://laconi.ca/trac/
1015 * e-mail to evan@identi.ca will usually be read and responded to very
1016 quickly, unless the question is really hard.
1021 The following is an incomplete list of developers who've worked on
1022 Laconi.ca. Apologies for any oversight; please let evan@identi.ca know
1023 if anyone's been overlooked in error.
1025 * Evan Prodromou, founder and lead developer, Control Yourself, Inc.
1026 * Zach Copley, Control Yourself, Inc.
1027 * Earle Martin, Control Yourself, Inc.
1028 * Marie-Claude Doyon, designer, Control Yourself, Inc.
1029 * Sarven Capadisli, Control Yourself, Inc.
1030 * Robin Millette, Control Yourself, Inc.
1041 * Ken Sheppardson (Trac server, man-about-town)
1042 * Tiago 'gouki' Faria (entrans)
1043 * Tryggvi Björgvinsson
1045 Thanks also to the developers of our upstream library code and to the
1046 thousands of people who have tried out Identi.ca, installed Laconi.ca,
1047 told their friends, and built the Open Microblogging network to what