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 New features in version 0.6.0 include:
76 * Invitations by email.
77 * Users can mark messages as "favorites" (only Web, not API).
78 * A bridge to push messages on the Laconica instance to an account on
80 * Direct private messages between users on a server (only Web, not API
82 * Restructured off-line daemons.
87 The following software packages are *required* for this software to
90 - PHP 5.2.x. It may be possible to run this software on earlier
91 versions of PHP, but many of the functions used are only available
93 - MySQL 5.x. The Laconica database is stored, by default, in a MySQL
94 server. It has been primarily tested on 5.x servers, although it may
95 be possible to install on earlier (or later!) versions. The server
96 *must* support the MyISAM storage engine -- the default for most
97 MySQL servers -- *and* the InnoDB storage engine.
98 - A Web server. Preferably, you should have Apache 2.2.x with the
99 mod_rewrite extension installed and enabled.
101 Your PHP installation must include the following PHP extensions:
103 - Curl. This is for fetching files by HTTP.
104 - XMLWriter. This is for formatting XML and HTML output.
105 - MySQL. For accessing the database.
106 - GD. For scaling down avatar images.
107 - mbstring. For handling Unicode (UTF-8) encoded strings.
109 For some functionality, you will also need the following extensions:
111 - Memcache. A client for the memcached server, which caches database
112 information in volatile memory. This is important for adequate
113 performance on high-traffic sites. You will also need a memcached
114 server to store the data in.
115 - Mailparse. Efficient parsing of email requires this extension.
116 Submission by email or SMS-over-email uses this extension.
118 You will almost definitely get 2-3 times better performance from your
119 site if you install a PHP bytecode cache/accelerator. Some well-known
120 examples are: eaccelerator, Turck mmcache, xcache, apc. Zend Optimizer
121 is a proprietary accelerator installed on some hosting sites.
126 A number of external PHP libraries are used to provide basic
127 functionality and optional functionality for your system. For your
128 convenience, they are available in the "extlib" directory of this
129 package, and you do not have to download and install them. However,
130 you may want to keep them up-to-date with the latest upstream version,
131 and the URLs are listed here for your convenience.
133 - DB_DataObject http://pear.php.net/package/DB_DataObject
134 - Validate http://pear.php.net/package/Validate
135 - OpenID from OpenIDEnabled (not the PEAR version!). We decided
136 to use the openidenabled.com version since it's more widely
137 implemented, and seems to be better supported.
138 http://openidenabled.com/php-openid/
139 - PEAR DB. Although this is an older data access system (new
140 packages should probably use PHP DBO), the OpenID libraries
141 depend on PEAR DB so we use it here, too. DB_DataObject can
142 also use PEAR MDB2, which may give you better performance
143 but won't work with OpenID.
144 http://pear.php.net/package/DB
145 - OAuth.php from http://oauth.googlecode.com/svn/code/php/
146 - markdown.php from http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/
147 - PEAR Mail, for sending out mail notifications
148 http://pear.php.net/package/Mail
149 - PEAR Net_SMTP, if you use the SMTP factory for notifications
150 http://pear.php.net/package/Net_SMTP
151 - XMPPHP, the follow-up to Class.Jabber.php. Probably the best XMPP
152 library available for PHP. http://xmpphp.googlecode.com/. Note that
153 as of this writing the version of this library that is available in
154 the extlib directory is *significantly different* from the upstream
155 version (patches have been submitted). Upgrading to the upstream
156 version may render your Laconica site unable to send or receive XMPP
159 A design goal of Laconica is that the basic Web functionality should
160 work on even the most restrictive commercial hosting services.
161 However, additional functionality, such as receiving messages by
162 Jabber/GTalk, require that you be able to run long-running processes
163 on your account. In addition, posting by email or from SMS require
164 that you be able to install a mail filter in your mail server.
169 Installing the basic Laconica Web component is relatively easy,
170 especially if you've previously installed PHP/MySQL packages.
172 1. Unpack the tarball you downloaded on your Web server. Usually a
173 command like this will work:
175 tar zxf laconica-0.6.0.tar.gz
177 ...which will make a laconica-0.6.0 subdirectory in your current
178 directory. (If you don't have shell access on your Web server, you
179 may have to unpack the tarball on your local computer and FTP the
180 files to the server.)
182 2. Move the tarball to a directory of your choosing in your Web root
183 directory. Usually something like this will work:
185 mv laconica-0.6.0 /var/www/mublog
187 This will make your Laconica instance available in the mublog path of
188 your server, like "http://example.net/mublog". "microblog" or
189 "laconica" might also be good path names. If you know how to
190 configure virtual hosts on your web server, you can try setting up
191 "http://micro.example.net/" or the like.
193 3. You should also take this moment to make your avatar subdirectory
194 writeable by the Web server. An insecure way to do this is:
196 chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/avatar
198 On some systems, this will probably work:
200 chgrp www-data /var/www/mublog/avatar
201 chmod g+w /var/www/mublog/avatar
203 If your Web server runs as another user besides "www-data", try
204 that user's default group instead. As a last resort, you can create
205 a new group like "avatar" and add the Web server's user to the group.
207 4. Create a database to hold your microblog data. Something like this
210 mysqladmin -u "username" --password="password" create laconica
212 Note that Laconica must have its own database; you can't share the
213 database with another program. You can name it whatever you want,
216 (If you don't have shell access to your server, you may need to use
217 a tool like PHPAdmin to create a database. Check your hosting
218 service's documentation for how to create a new MySQL database.)
220 5. Run the laconica.sql SQL script in the db subdirectory to create
221 the database tables in the database. A typical system would work
224 mysql -u "username" --password="password" laconica < /var/www/mublog/db/laconica.sql
226 You may want to test by logging into the database and checking that
227 the tables were created. Here's an example:
231 6. Create a new database account that Laconica will use to access the
232 database. If you have shell access, this will probably work from the
235 GRANT SELECT,INSERT,DELETE,UPDATE on laconica.*
236 TO 'lacuser'@'localhost'
237 IDENTIFIED BY 'lacpassword';
239 You should change 'lacuser' and 'lacpassword' to your preferred new
240 username and password. You may want to test logging in as this new
241 user and testing that you can SELECT from some of the tables in the
242 DB (use SHOW TABLES to see which ones are there).
244 7. Copy the config.php.sample in the Laconica directory to config.php.
246 8. Edit config.php to set the basic configuration for your system.
247 (See descriptions below for basic config options.) Note that there
248 are lots of options and if you try to do them all at once, you will
249 have a hard time making sure what's working and what's not. So,
250 stick with the basics at first.
252 9. At this point, you should be able to navigate in a browser to your
253 microblog's main directory and see the "Public Timeline", which
254 will be empty. If not, magic has happened! You can now register a
255 new user, post some notices, edit your profile, etc. However, you
256 may want to wait to do that stuff if you think you can set up
257 "fancy URLs" (see below), since some URLs are stored in the database.
262 By default, Laconica will have big long sloppy URLs that are hard for
263 people to remember or use. For example, a user's home profile might be
266 http://example.org/mublog/index.php?action=showstream&nickname=fred
268 It's possible to configure the software so it looks like this instead:
270 http://example.org/mublog/fred
272 These "fancy URLs" are more readable and memorable for users. To use
273 fancy URLs, you must either have Apache 2.2.x with .htaccess enabled
274 and mod_redirect enabled, -OR- know how to configure "url redirection"
277 1. Copy the htaccess.sample file to .htaccess in your Laconica
278 directory. Note: if you have control of your server's httpd.conf or
279 similar configuration files, it can greatly improve performance to
280 import the .htaccess file into your conf file instead. If you're
281 not sure how to do it, you may save yourself a lot of headache by
282 just leaving the .htaccess file.
284 2. Change the "RewriteBase" in the new .htaccess file to be the URL path
285 to your Laconica installation on your server. Typically this will
286 be the path to your Laconica directory relative to your Web root.
288 3. Add or uncomment or change a line in your config.php file so it says:
290 $config['site']['fancy'] = true;
292 You should now be able to navigate to a "fancy" URL on your server,
295 http://example.net/mublog/main/register
297 If you changed your HTTP server configuration, you may need to restart
300 If you have problems with the .htaccess file on versions of Apache
301 earlier than 2.2.x, try changing the regular expressions in the
302 htaccess.sample file that use "\w" to just use ".".
307 Laconica supports a cheap-and-dirty system for sending update messages
308 to mobile phones and for receiving updates from the mobile. Instead of
309 sending through the SMS network itself, which is costly and requires
310 buy-in from the wireless carriers, it simply piggybacks on the email
311 gateways that many carriers provide to their customers. So, SMS
312 configuration is essentially email configuration.
314 Each user sends to a made-up email address, which they keep a secret.
315 Incoming email that is "From" the user's SMS email address, and "To"
316 the users' secret email address on the site's domain, will be
317 converted to a message and stored in the DB.
319 For this to work, there *must* be a domain or sub-domain for which all
320 (or most) incoming email can pass through the incoming mail filter.
322 1. Run the SQL script carrier.sql in your Laconica database. This will
325 mysql -u "lacuser" --password="lacpassword" laconica < db/carrier.sql
327 This will populate your database with a list of wireless carriers
328 that support email SMS gateways.
330 2. Make sure the maildaemon.php file is executable:
332 chmod +x scripts/maildaemon.php
334 Note that "daemon" is kind of a misnomer here; the script is more
335 of a filter than a daemon.
337 2. Edit /etc/aliases on your mail server and add the following line:
339 *: /path/to/laconica/scripts/maildaemon.php
341 3. Run whatever code you need to to update your aliases database. For
342 many mail servers (Postfix, Exim, Sendmail), this should work:
346 You may need to restart your mail server for the new database to
349 4. Set the following in your config.php file:
351 $config['mail']['domain'] = 'yourdomain.example.net';
353 At this point, post-by-email and post-by-SMS-gateway should work. Note
354 that if your mail server is on a different computer from your email
355 server, you'll need to have a full installation of Laconica, a working
356 config.php, and access to the Laconica database from the mail server.
361 XMPP (eXtended Message and Presence Protocol, http://xmpp.org/) is the
362 instant-messenger protocol that drives Jabber and GTalk IM. You can
363 distribute messages via XMPP using the system below; however, you
364 need to run the XMPP incoming daemon to allow incoming messages as
367 1. You may want to strongly consider setting up your own XMPP server.
368 Ejabberd, OpenFire, and JabberD are all Open Source servers.
369 Jabber, Inc. provides a high-performance commercial server.
371 2. You must register a Jabber ID (JID) with your new server. It helps
372 to choose a name like "update@example.com" or "notice" or something
373 similar. Alternately, your "update JID" can be registered on a
374 publicly-available XMPP service, like jabber.org or GTalk.
376 Laconica will not register the JID with your chosen XMPP server;
377 you need to do this manually, with an XMPP client like Gajim,
378 Telepathy, or Pidgin.im.
380 3. Configure your site's XMPP variables, as described below in the
381 configuration section.
383 On a default installation, your site can broadcast messages using
384 XMPP. Users won't be able to post messages using XMPP unless you've
385 got the XMPP daemon running. See 'Queues and daemons' below for how
386 to set that up. Also, once you have a sizable number of users, sending
387 a lot of SMS, OMB, and XMPP messages whenever someone posts a message
388 can really slow down your site; it may cause posting to timeout.
393 You can send *all* messages from your microblogging site to a
394 third-party service using XMPP. This can be useful for providing
395 search, indexing, bridging, or other cool services.
397 To configure a downstream site to receive your public stream, add
398 their "JID" (Jabber ID) to your config.php as follows:
400 $config['xmpp']['public'][] = 'downstream@example.net';
402 (Don't miss those square brackets at the end.) Note that your XMPP
403 broadcasting must be configured as mentioned above. Although you can
404 send out messages at "Web time", high-volume sites should strongly
405 consider setting up queues and daemons.
410 Some activities that Laconica needs to do, like broadcast OMB, SMS,
411 and XMPP messages, can be 'queued' and done by off-line bots instead.
412 For this to work, you must be able to run long-running offline
413 processes, either on your main Web server or on another server you
414 control. (Your other server will still need all the above
415 prerequisites, with the exception of Apache.) Installing on a separate
416 server is probably a good idea for high-volume sites.
418 1. You'll need the "CLI" (command-line interface) version of PHP
419 installed on whatever server you use.
421 2. If you're using a separate server for queues, install Laconica
422 somewhere on the server. You don't need to worry about the
423 .htaccess file, but make sure that your config.php file is close
424 to, or identical to, your Web server's version.
426 3. In your config.php files (both the Web server and the queues
427 server!), set the following variable:
429 $config['queue']['enabled'] = true;
431 4. On the queues server, run the command scripts/startdaemons.sh. It
432 needs as a parameter the install path; if you run it from the
433 Laconica dir, "." should suffice.
435 This will run six (for now) queue handlers:
437 * xmppdaemon.php - listens for new XMPP messages from users and stores
438 them as notices in the database.
439 * jabberqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
440 registered users who should receive them.
441 * publicqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
442 public feed listeners.
443 * ombqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to OpenMicroBlogging
444 recipients on foreign servers.
445 * smsqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to SMS-over-email addresses
447 * xmppconfirmhandler.php - sends confirmation messages to registered
450 Note that these queue daemons are pretty raw, and need your care. In
451 particular, they leak memory, and you may want to restart them on a
452 regular (daily or so) basis with a cron job. Also, if they lose
453 the connection to the XMPP server for too long, they'll simply die. It
454 may be a good idea to use a daemon-monitoring service, like 'monit',
455 to check their status and keep them running.
457 All the daemons write their process IDs (pids) to /var/run/ by
458 default. This can be useful for starting, stopping, and monitoring the
464 Sitemap files (http://sitemaps.org/) are a very nice way of telling
465 search engines and other interested bots what's available on your site
466 and what's changed recently. You can generate sitemap files for your
469 1. Choose your sitemap URL layout. Laconica creates a number of
470 sitemap XML files for different parts of your site. You may want to
471 put these in a sub-directory of your Laconica directory to avoid
472 clutter. The sitemap index file tells the search engines and other
473 bots where to find all the sitemap files; it *must* be in the main
474 installation directory or higher. Both types of file must be
475 available through HTTP.
477 2. To generate your sitemaps, run the following command on your server:
479 php scripts/sitemap.php -f index-file-path -d sitemap-directory -u URL-prefix-for-sitemaps
481 Here, index-file-path is the full path to the sitemap index file,
482 like './sitemapindex.xml'. sitemap-directory is the directory where
483 you want the sitemaps stored, like './sitemaps/' (make sure the dir
484 exists). URL-prefix-for-sitemaps is the full URL for the sitemap dir,
485 typically something like 'http://example.net/mublog/sitemaps/'.
487 You can use several methods for submitting your sitemap index to
488 search engines to get your site indexed. One is to add a line like the
489 following to your robots.txt file:
491 Sitemap: /mublog/sitemapindex.xml
493 This is a good idea for letting *all* Web spiders know about your
494 sitemap. You can also submit sitemap files to major search engines
495 using their respective "Webmaster centres"; see sitemaps.org for links
501 There are two themes shipped with this version of Laconica: "stoica",
502 which is what the Identi.ca site uses, and "default", which is a good
503 basis for other sites.
505 As of right now, your ability to change the theme is site-wide; users
506 can't choose their own theme. Additionally, the only thing you can
507 change in the theme is CSS stylesheets and some image files; you can't
508 change the HTML output, like adding or removing menu items.
510 You can choose a theme using the $config['site']['theme'] element in
511 the config.php file. See below for details.
513 You can add your own theme by making a sub-directory of the 'theme'
514 subdirectory with the name of your theme. Each theme can have the
517 display.css: a CSS2 file for "default" styling for all browsers.
518 ie6.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
520 ie7.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
522 logo.png: a logo image for the site.
523 default-avatar-profile.png: a 96x96 pixel image to use as the avatar for
524 users who don't upload their own.
525 default-avatar-stream.png: Ditto, but 48x48. For streams of notices.
526 default-avatar-mini.png: Ditto ditto, but 24x24. For subscriptions
527 listing on profile pages.
529 You may want to start by copying the files from the default theme to
535 Translations in Laconica use the gettext system (http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/).
536 Theoretically, you can add your own sub-directory to the locale/
537 subdirectory to add a new language to your system. You'll need to
538 compile the ".po" files into ".mo" files, however.
543 If you've been using Laconica 0.5 or lower, or if you've been tracking
544 the "darcs" version of the software, you will probably want to upgrade
545 and keep your existing data. There is no automated upgrade procedure
546 in Laconica 0.6. Try these step-by-step instructions; read to the end
547 first before trying them.
549 0. Download Laconica and set up all the prerequisites as if you were
551 1. Make backups of both your database and your Web directory. UNDER NO
552 CIRCUMSTANCES should you try to do an upgrade without a known-good
553 backup. You have been warned.
554 2. Shut down Web access to your site, either by turning off your Web
555 server or by redirecting all pages to a "sorry, under maintenance"
557 3. Shut down XMPP access to your site, typically by shutting down the
558 xmppdaemon.php process and all other daemons that you're running.
559 If you've got "monit" or "cron" automatically restarting your
560 daemons, make sure to turn that off, too.
561 4. Shut down SMS and email access to your site. The easy way to do
562 this is to comment out the line piping incoming email to your
563 maildaemon.php file, and running something like "newaliases".
564 5. Once all writing processes to your site are turned off, make a
565 final backup of the Web directory and database.
566 6. Move your Laconica directory to a backup spot, like "mublog.bak".
567 7. Unpack your Laconica 0.6 tarball and move it to "mublog" or
568 wherever your code used to be.
569 8. Copy the config.php file and avatar directory from your old
570 directory to your new directory.
571 9. Copy htaccess.sample to .htaccess in the new directory. Change the
572 RewriteBase to use the correct path.
573 10. Rebuild the database. Go to your Laconica directory and run the
574 rebuilddb.sh script like this:
576 ./scripts/rebuilddb.sh rootuser rootpassword database db/laconica.sql
578 Here, rootuser and rootpassword are the username and password for a
579 user who can drop and create databases as well as tables; typically
580 that's _not_ the user Laconica runs as.
581 11. Use mysql client to log into your database and make sure that the
582 notice, user, profile, subscription etc. tables are non-empty.
583 12. Turn back on the Web server, and check that things still work.
584 13. Turn back on XMPP bots and email maildaemon. Note that the XMPP
585 bots have changed since version 0.5; see above for details.
587 If you're upgrading from very old versions, you may want to look at
588 the fixup_* scripts in the scripts directories. These will store some
589 precooked data in the DB.
591 Configuration options
592 =====================
594 The sole configuration file for Laconica (excepting configurations for
595 dependency software) is config.php in your Laconica directory. If you
596 edit any other file in the directory, like lib/common.php (where most
597 of the defaults are defined), you will lose your configuration options
598 in any upgrade, and you will wish that you had been more careful.
600 Almost all configuration options are made through a two-dimensional
601 associative array, cleverly named $config. A typical configuration
604 $config['section']['option'] = value;
606 For brevity, the following documentation describes each section and
612 This section is a catch-all for site-wide variables.
614 name: the name of your site, like 'YourCompany Microblog'.
615 server: the server part of your site's URLs, like 'example.net'.
616 path: The path part of your site's URLs, like 'mublog' or '/'
618 fancy: whether or not your site uses fancy URLs (see Fancy URLs
619 section above). Default is false.
620 logfile: full path to a file for Laconica to save logging
621 information to. You may want to use this if you don't have
623 locale_path: full path to the directory for locale data. Unless you
624 store all your locale data in one place, you probably
625 don't need to use this.
626 language: default language for your site. Defaults to US English.
627 languages: A list of languages supported on your site. Typically you'd
628 only change this if you wanted to disable support for one
630 "unset($config['site']['languages']['de'])" will disable
632 theme: Theme for your site (see Theme section). Two themes are
633 provided by default: 'default' and 'stoica' (the one used by
634 Identi.ca). It's appreciated if you don't use the 'stoica' theme
635 except as the basis for your own.
636 email: contact email address for your site. By default, it's extracted
637 from your Web server environment; you may want to customize it.
638 broughtbyurl: name of an organization or individual who provides the
639 service. Each page will include a link to this name in the
640 footer. A good way to link to the blog, forum, wiki,
641 corporate portal, or whoever is making the service available.
642 broughtby: text used for the "brought by" link.
643 timezone: default timezone for message display. Users can set their
644 own time zone. Defaults to 'UTC', which is a pretty good default.
645 closed: If set to 'true', will disallow registration on your site.
646 This is a cheap way to restrict accounts to only one
647 individual or group; just register the accounts you want on
648 the service, *then* set this variable to 'true'.
653 By default, Laconica sites log error messages to the syslog facility.
654 (You can override this using the 'logfile' parameter described above).
656 appname: The name that Laconica uses to log messages. By default it's
657 "laconica", but if you have more than one installation on the
658 server, you may want to change the name for each instance so
659 you can track log messages more easily.
664 You can configure the software to queue time-consuming tasks, like
665 sending out SMS email or XMPP messages, for off-line processing. See
666 'Queues and daemons' above for how to set this up.
668 enabled: Whether to uses queues. Defaults to false.
673 The default license to use for your users notices. The default is the
674 Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which is probably the right
675 choice for any public site. Note that some other servers will not
676 accept notices if you apply a stricter license than this.
678 url: URL of the license, used for links.
679 title: Title for the license, like 'Creative Commons Attribution 3.0'.
680 image: A button shown on each page for the license.
685 This is for configuring out-going email. We use PEAR's Mail module,
686 see: http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.mail.mail.factory.php
688 backend: the backend to use for mail, one of 'mail', 'sendmail', and
689 'smtp'. Defaults to PEAR's default, 'mail'.
690 params: if the mail backend requires any parameters, you can provide
691 them in an associative array.
696 This is for configuring nicknames in the service.
698 blacklist: an array of strings for usernames that may not be
699 registered. A default array exists for strings that are
700 used by Laconica (e.g. 'doc', 'main', 'avatar', 'theme')
701 but you may want to add others if you have other software
702 installed in a subdirectory of Laconica or if you just
703 don't want certain words used as usernames.
708 For configuring avatar access.
710 server: If set, defines another server where avatars are stored in the
711 root directory. Note that the 'avatar' subdir still has to be
712 writeable. You'd typically use this to split HTTP requests on
713 the client to speed up page loading, either with another
714 virtual server or with an NFS or SAMBA share. Clients
715 typically only make 2 connections to a single server at a
716 time (http://ur1.ca/6ih), so this can parallelize the job.
722 For configuring the public stream.
724 localonly: If set to true, only messages posted by users of this
725 service (rather than other services, filtered through OMB)
726 are shown in the public stream. Default true.
731 server: Like avatars, you can speed up page loading by pointing the
732 theme file lookup to another server (virtual or real). The
733 theme server's root path should map to the Laconica "theme"
734 subdirectory. Defaults to NULL.
739 For configuring the XMPP sub-system.
741 enabled: Whether to accept and send messages by XMPP. Default false.
742 server: server part of XMPP ID for update user.
743 port: connection port for clients. Default 5222, which you probably
744 shouldn't need to change.
745 user: username for the client connection. Users will receive messages
746 from 'user'@'server'.
747 resource: a unique identifier for the connection to the server. This
748 is actually used as a prefix for each XMPP component in the system.
749 password: password for the user account.
750 host: some XMPP domains are served by machines with a different
751 hostname. (For example, @gmail.com GTalk users connect to
752 talk.google.com). Set this to the correct hostname if that's the
753 case with your server.
754 encryption: Whether to encrypt the connection between Laconica and the
755 XMPP server. Defaults to true, but you can get
756 considerably better performance turning it off if you're
757 connecting to a server on the same machine or on a
759 debug: if turned on, this will make the XMPP library blurt out all of
760 the incoming and outgoing messages as XML stanzas. Use as a
761 last resort, and never turn it on if you don't have queues
762 enabled, since it will spit out sensitive data to the browser.
763 public: an array of JIDs to send _all_ notices to. This is useful for
764 participating in third-party search and archiving services.
769 Miscellaneous tagging stuff.
771 dropoff: Decay factor for tag listing, in seconds.
772 Defaults to exponential decay over ten days; you can twiddle
773 with it to try and get better results for your site.
778 For daemon processes.
780 piddir: directory that daemon processes should write their PID file
781 (process ID) to. Defaults to /var/run/, which is where this
782 stuff should usually go on Unix-ish systems.
783 user: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective user ID
784 to this user before running. Probably a good idea, especially if
785 you start the daemons as root. Note: user name, like 'daemon',
787 group: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective group ID
788 to this named group. Again, a name, not a numerical ID.
793 The primary output for Laconica is syslog, unless you configured a
794 separate logfile. This is probably the first place to look if you're
795 getting weird behaviour from Laconica.
797 If you're tracking the unstable version of Laconica in the darcs
798 repository (see below), and you get a compilation error ("unexpected
799 T_STRING") in the browser, check to see that you don't have any
800 conflicts in your code.
805 These are some myths you may see on the Web about Laconica.
806 Documentation from the core team about Laconica has been pretty
807 sparse, so some backtracking and guesswork resulted in some incorrect
810 - "Set $config['db']['debug'] = 5 to debug the database." This is an
811 extremely bad idea. It's a tool built into DB_DataObject that will
812 emit oodles of print lines directly to the browser of your users.
813 Among these lines will be your database username and password. Do
814 not enable this option on a production Web site for any reason.
816 - "Edit dataobject.ini with the following settings..." dataobject.ini
817 is a development file for the DB_DataObject framework and is not
818 used by the running software. It was removed from the Laconica
819 distribution because its presence was confusing. Do not bother
820 configuring dataobject.ini, and do not put your database username
821 and password into the file on a production Web server; unscrupulous
822 persons may try to read it to get your passwords.
827 If you're adventurous or impatient, you may want to install the
828 development version of Laconica. To get it, use the darcs version
829 control tool (http://darcs.net/) like so:
831 darcs get http://laconi.ca/darcs/ mublog
833 To keep it up-to-date, use 'darcs pull'. Watch for conflicts!
838 There are several ways to get more information about Laconica.
840 * There is a mailing list for Laconica developers and admins at
841 http://mail.laconi.ca/mailman/listinfo/laconica-dev
842 * The #laconica IRC channel on freenode.net (http://www.freenode.net/).
843 * The Laconica wiki, http://laconi.ca/trac/
848 * Microblogging messages to http://identi.ca/evan are very welcome.
849 * Laconica's Trac server has a bug tracker for any defects you may find,
850 or ideas for making things better. http://laconi.ca/trac/
851 * e-mail to evan@identi.ca will usually be read and responded to very
852 quickly, unless the question is really hard.
857 The following is an incomplete list of developers who've worked on
858 Laconi.ca. Apologies for any oversight; please let evan@identi.ca know
859 if anyone's been overlooked in error.
861 * Evan Prodromou, founder and lead developer, Control Yourself, Inc.
862 * Zach Copley, Control Yourself, Inc.
863 * Earle Martin, Control Yourself, Inc.
864 * Marie-Claude Doyon, designer, Control Yourself, Inc.
875 * Ken Sheppardson (Trac server, man-about-town)
876 * Tiago 'gouki' Faria (entrans)
878 Thanks also to the thousands of people who have tried out Identi.ca,
879 installed Laconi.ca, told their friends, and built the Open
880 Microblogging network to what it is today.