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.
204 - PEAR Services_oEmbed. Used for some multimedia integration.
205 - PEAR HTTP_Request is an oEmbed dependency.
206 - PEAR Validat is an oEmbed dependency.e
207 - PEAR Net_URL is an oEmbed dependency.2
209 A design goal of Laconica is that the basic Web functionality should
210 work on even the most restrictive commercial hosting services.
211 However, additional functionality, such as receiving messages by
212 Jabber/GTalk, require that you be able to run long-running processes
213 on your account. In addition, posting by email or from SMS require
214 that you be able to install a mail filter in your mail server.
219 Installing the basic Laconica Web component is relatively easy,
220 especially if you've previously installed PHP/MySQL packages.
222 1. Unpack the tarball you downloaded on your Web server. Usually a
223 command like this will work:
225 tar zxf laconica-0.7.1.tar.gz
227 ...which will make a laconica-0.7.1 subdirectory in your current
228 directory. (If you don't have shell access on your Web server, you
229 may have to unpack the tarball on your local computer and FTP the
230 files to the server.)
232 2. Move the tarball to a directory of your choosing in your Web root
233 directory. Usually something like this will work:
235 mv laconica-0.7.1 /var/www/mublog
237 This will make your Laconica instance available in the mublog path of
238 your server, like "http://example.net/mublog". "microblog" or
239 "laconica" might also be good path names. If you know how to
240 configure virtual hosts on your web server, you can try setting up
241 "http://micro.example.net/" or the like.
243 3. Make your target directory writeable by the Web server.
245 chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/
247 On some systems, this will probably work:
249 chgrp www-data /var/www/mublog/
250 chmod g+w /var/www/mublog/
252 If your Web server runs as another user besides "www-data", try
253 that user's default group instead. As a last resort, you can create
254 a new group like "mublog" and add the Web server's user to the group.
256 4. You should also take this moment to make your avatar subdirectory
257 writeable by the Web server. An insecure way to do this is:
259 chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/avatar
261 You can also make the avatar directory writeable by the Web server
262 group, as noted above.
264 5. Create a database to hold your microblog data. Something like this
267 mysqladmin -u "username" --password="password" create laconica
269 Note that Laconica must have its own database; you can't share the
270 database with another program. You can name it whatever you want,
273 (If you don't have shell access to your server, you may need to use
274 a tool like PHPAdmin to create a database. Check your hosting
275 service's documentation for how to create a new MySQL database.)
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 ALL 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 to MySQL as
289 7. In a browser, navigate to the Laconica install script; something like:
291 http://yourserver.example.com/mublog/install.php
293 Enter the database connection information and your site name. The
294 install program will configure your site and install the initial,
295 almost-empty database.
297 8. You should now be able to navigate to your microblog's main directory
298 and see the "Public Timeline", which will be empty. If not, magic
299 has happened! You can now register a new user, post some notices,
300 edit your profile, etc. However, you may want to wait to do that stuff
301 if you think you can set up "fancy URLs" (see below), since some
302 URLs are stored in the database.
307 By default, Laconica will use URLs that include the main PHP program's
308 name in them. For example, a user's home profile might be
311 http://example.org/mublog/index.php/mublog/fred
313 On certain systems that don't support this kind of syntax, they'll
316 http://example.org/mublog/index.php?p=mublog/fred
318 It's possible to configure the software so it looks like this instead:
320 http://example.org/mublog/fred
322 These "fancy URLs" are more readable and memorable for users. To use
323 fancy URLs, you must either have Apache 2.x with .htaccess enabled and
324 mod_redirect enabled, -OR- know how to configure "url redirection" in
327 1. Copy the htaccess.sample file to .htaccess in your Laconica
328 directory. Note: if you have control of your server's httpd.conf or
329 similar configuration files, it can greatly improve performance to
330 import the .htaccess file into your conf file instead. If you're
331 not sure how to do it, you may save yourself a lot of headache by
332 just leaving the .htaccess file.
334 2. Change the "RewriteBase" in the new .htaccess file to be the URL path
335 to your Laconica installation on your server. Typically this will
336 be the path to your Laconica directory relative to your Web root.
338 3. Add or uncomment or change a line in your config.php file so it says:
340 $config['site']['fancy'] = true;
342 You should now be able to navigate to a "fancy" URL on your server,
345 http://example.net/mublog/main/register
347 If you changed your HTTP server configuration, you may need to restart
353 To use a Sphinx server to search users and notices, you also need
354 to install, compile and enable the sphinx pecl extension for php on the
355 client side, which itself depends on the sphinx development files.
356 "pecl install sphinx" should take care of that. Add "extension=sphinx.so"
357 to your php.ini and reload apache to enable it.
359 You can update your MySQL or Postgresql databases to drop their fulltext
360 search indexes, since they're now provided by sphinx.
362 On the sphinx server side, a script reads the main database and build
363 the keyword index. A cron job reads the database and keeps the sphinx
364 indexes up to date. scripts/sphinx-cron.sh should be called by cron
365 every 5 minutes, for example. scripts/sphinx.sh is an init.d script
366 to start and stop the sphinx search daemon.
371 Laconica supports a cheap-and-dirty system for sending update messages
372 to mobile phones and for receiving updates from the mobile. Instead of
373 sending through the SMS network itself, which is costly and requires
374 buy-in from the wireless carriers, it simply piggybacks on the email
375 gateways that many carriers provide to their customers. So, SMS
376 configuration is essentially email configuration.
378 Each user sends to a made-up email address, which they keep a secret.
379 Incoming email that is "From" the user's SMS email address, and "To"
380 the users' secret email address on the site's domain, will be
381 converted to a notice and stored in the DB.
383 For this to work, there *must* be a domain or sub-domain for which all
384 (or most) incoming email can pass through the incoming mail filter.
386 1. Run the SQL script carrier.sql in your Laconica database. This will
389 mysql -u "lacuser" --password="lacpassword" laconica < db/carrier.sql
391 This will populate your database with a list of wireless carriers
392 that support email SMS gateways.
394 2. Make sure the maildaemon.php file is executable:
396 chmod +x scripts/maildaemon.php
398 Note that "daemon" is kind of a misnomer here; the script is more
399 of a filter than a daemon.
401 2. Edit /etc/aliases on your mail server and add the following line:
403 *: /path/to/laconica/scripts/maildaemon.php
405 3. Run whatever code you need to to update your aliases database. For
406 many mail servers (Postfix, Exim, Sendmail), this should work:
410 You may need to restart your mail server for the new database to
413 4. Set the following in your config.php file:
415 $config['mail']['domain'] = 'yourdomain.example.net';
417 At this point, post-by-email and post-by-SMS-gateway should work. Note
418 that if your mail server is on a different computer from your email
419 server, you'll need to have a full installation of Laconica, a working
420 config.php, and access to the Laconica database from the mail server.
425 XMPP (eXtended Message and Presence Protocol, <http://xmpp.org/>) is the
426 instant-messenger protocol that drives Jabber and GTalk IM. You can
427 distribute messages via XMPP using the system below; however, you
428 need to run the XMPP incoming daemon to allow incoming messages as
431 1. You may want to strongly consider setting up your own XMPP server.
432 Ejabberd, OpenFire, and JabberD are all Open Source servers.
433 Jabber, Inc. provides a high-performance commercial server.
435 2. You must register a Jabber ID (JID) with your new server. It helps
436 to choose a name like "update@example.com" or "notice" or something
437 similar. Alternately, your "update JID" can be registered on a
438 publicly-available XMPP service, like jabber.org or GTalk.
440 Laconica will not register the JID with your chosen XMPP server;
441 you need to do this manually, with an XMPP client like Gajim,
442 Telepathy, or Pidgin.im.
444 3. Configure your site's XMPP variables, as described below in the
445 configuration section.
447 On a default installation, your site can broadcast messages using
448 XMPP. Users won't be able to post messages using XMPP unless you've
449 got the XMPP daemon running. See 'Queues and daemons' below for how
450 to set that up. Also, once you have a sizable number of users, sending
451 a lot of SMS, OMB, and XMPP messages whenever someone posts a message
452 can really slow down your site; it may cause posting to timeout.
454 NOTE: stream_select(), a crucial function for network programming, is
455 broken on PHP 5.2.x less than 5.2.6 on amd64-based servers. We don't
456 work around this bug in Laconica; current recommendation is to move
457 off of amd64 to another server.
462 You can send *all* messages from your microblogging site to a
463 third-party service using XMPP. This can be useful for providing
464 search, indexing, bridging, or other cool services.
466 To configure a downstream site to receive your public stream, add
467 their "JID" (Jabber ID) to your config.php as follows:
469 $config['xmpp']['public'][] = 'downstream@example.net';
471 (Don't miss those square brackets at the end.) Note that your XMPP
472 broadcasting must be configured as mentioned above. Although you can
473 send out messages at "Web time", high-volume sites should strongly
474 consider setting up queues and daemons.
479 Some activities that Laconica needs to do, like broadcast OMB, SMS,
480 and XMPP messages, can be 'queued' and done by off-line bots instead.
481 For this to work, you must be able to run long-running offline
482 processes, either on your main Web server or on another server you
483 control. (Your other server will still need all the above
484 prerequisites, with the exception of Apache.) Installing on a separate
485 server is probably a good idea for high-volume sites.
487 1. You'll need the "CLI" (command-line interface) version of PHP
488 installed on whatever server you use.
490 2. If you're using a separate server for queues, install Laconica
491 somewhere on the server. You don't need to worry about the
492 .htaccess file, but make sure that your config.php file is close
493 to, or identical to, your Web server's version.
495 3. In your config.php files (both the Web server and the queues
496 server!), set the following variable:
498 $config['queue']['enabled'] = true;
500 You may also want to look at the 'daemon' section of this file for
501 more daemon options. Note that if you set the 'user' and/or 'group'
502 options, you'll need to create that user and/or group by hand.
503 They're not created automatically.
505 4. On the queues server, run the command scripts/startdaemons.sh. It
506 needs as a parameter the install path; if you run it from the
507 Laconica dir, "." should suffice.
509 This will run eight (for now) queue handlers:
511 * xmppdaemon.php - listens for new XMPP messages from users and stores
512 them as notices in the database.
513 * jabberqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
514 registered users who should receive them.
515 * publicqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
516 public feed listeners.
517 * ombqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to OpenMicroBlogging
518 recipients on foreign servers.
519 * smsqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to SMS-over-email addresses
521 * xmppconfirmhandler.php - sends confirmation messages to registered
523 * twitterqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to Twitter for user
524 who have opted to set up Twitter bridging.
525 * facebookqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to Facebook for users
526 of the built-in Facebook application.
528 Note that these queue daemons are pretty raw, and need your care. In
529 particular, they leak memory, and you may want to restart them on a
530 regular (daily or so) basis with a cron job. Also, if they lose
531 the connection to the XMPP server for too long, they'll simply die. It
532 may be a good idea to use a daemon-monitoring service, like 'monit',
533 to check their status and keep them running.
535 All the daemons write their process IDs (pids) to /var/run/ by
536 default. This can be useful for starting, stopping, and monitoring the
539 Twitter Friends Syncing
540 -----------------------
542 As of Laconica 0.6.3, users may set a flag in their settings ("Subscribe
543 to my Twitter friends here" under the Twitter tab) to have Laconica
544 attempt to locate and subscribe to "friends" (people they "follow") on
545 Twitter who also have accounts on your Laconica system, and who have
546 previously set up a link for automatically posting notices to Twitter.
548 Optionally, there is a script (./scripts/synctwitterfriends.php), meant
549 to be run periodically from a job scheduler (e.g.: cron under Unix), to
550 look for new additions to users' friends lists. Note that the friends
551 syncing only subscribes users to each other, it does not unsubscribe
552 users when they stop following each other on Twitter.
556 # Update Twitter friends subscriptions every half hour
557 0,30 * * * * /path/to/php /path/to/laconica/scripts/synctwitterfriends.php>&/dev/null
559 Built-in Facebook Application
560 -----------------------------
562 Laconica's Facebook application allows your users to automatically
563 update their Facebook statuses with their latest notices, invite
564 their friends to use the app (and thus your site), view their notice
565 timelines, and post notices -- all from within Facebook. The application
566 is built into Laconica and runs on your host. For automatic Facebook
567 status updating to work you will need to enable queuing and run the
568 facebookqueuehandler.php daemon (see the "Queues and daemons" section
571 Quick setup instructions*:
573 Install the Facebook Developer application on Facebook:
575 http://www.facebook.com/developers/
577 Use it to create a new application and generate an API key and secret.
578 Uncomment the Facebook app section of your config.php and copy in the
579 key and secret, e.g.:
581 # Config section for the built-in Facebook application
582 $config['facebook']['apikey'] = 'APIKEY';
583 $config['facebook']['secret'] = 'SECRET';
585 In Facebook's application editor, specify the following URLs for your app:
587 - Callback URL: http://example.net/mublog/facebook/
588 - Post-Remove URL: http://example.net/mublog/facebook/remove
589 - Post-Add Redirect URL: http://apps.facebook.com/yourapp/
590 - Canvas URL: http://apps.facebook.com/yourapp/
592 (Replace 'example.net' with your host's URL, 'mublog' with the path
593 to your Laconica installation, and 'yourapp' with the name of the
594 Facebook application you created.)
596 Additionally, Choose "Web" for Application type in the Advanced tab.
597 In the "Canvas setting" section, choose the "FBML" for Render Method,
598 "Smart Size" for IFrame size, and "Full width (760px)" for Canvas Width.
599 Everything else can be left with default values.
601 *For more detailed instructions please see the installation guide on the
604 http://laconi.ca/trac/wiki/FacebookApplication
609 Sitemap files <http://sitemaps.org/> are a very nice way of telling
610 search engines and other interested bots what's available on your site
611 and what's changed recently. You can generate sitemap files for your
614 1. Choose your sitemap URL layout. Laconica creates a number of
615 sitemap XML files for different parts of your site. You may want to
616 put these in a sub-directory of your Laconica directory to avoid
617 clutter. The sitemap index file tells the search engines and other
618 bots where to find all the sitemap files; it *must* be in the main
619 installation directory or higher. Both types of file must be
620 available through HTTP.
622 2. To generate your sitemaps, run the following command on your server:
624 php scripts/sitemap.php -f index-file-path -d sitemap-directory -u URL-prefix-for-sitemaps
626 Here, index-file-path is the full path to the sitemap index file,
627 like './sitemapindex.xml'. sitemap-directory is the directory where
628 you want the sitemaps stored, like './sitemaps/' (make sure the dir
629 exists). URL-prefix-for-sitemaps is the full URL for the sitemap dir,
630 typically something like <http://example.net/mublog/sitemaps/>.
632 You can use several methods for submitting your sitemap index to
633 search engines to get your site indexed. One is to add a line like the
634 following to your robots.txt file:
636 Sitemap: /mublog/sitemapindex.xml
638 This is a good idea for letting *all* Web spiders know about your
639 sitemap. You can also submit sitemap files to major search engines
640 using their respective "Webmaster centres"; see sitemaps.org for links
646 There are two themes shipped with this version of Laconica: "identica",
647 which is what the Identi.ca site uses, and "default", which is a good
648 basis for other sites.
650 As of right now, your ability to change the theme is site-wide; users
651 can't choose their own theme. Additionally, the only thing you can
652 change in the theme is CSS stylesheets and some image files; you can't
653 change the HTML output, like adding or removing menu items.
655 You can choose a theme using the $config['site']['theme'] element in
656 the config.php file. See below for details.
658 You can add your own theme by making a sub-directory of the 'theme'
659 subdirectory with the name of your theme. Each theme can have the
662 display.css: a CSS2 file for "default" styling for all browsers.
663 ie6.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
665 ie7.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
667 logo.png: a logo image for the site.
668 default-avatar-profile.png: a 96x96 pixel image to use as the avatar for
669 users who don't upload their own.
670 default-avatar-stream.png: Ditto, but 48x48. For streams of notices.
671 default-avatar-mini.png: Ditto ditto, but 24x24. For subscriptions
672 listing on profile pages.
674 You may want to start by copying the files from the default theme to
677 NOTE: the HTML generated by Laconica changed *radically* between
678 version 0.6.x and 0.7.x. Older themes will need signification
679 modification to use the new output format.
684 Translations in Laconica use the gettext system <http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/>.
685 Theoretically, you can add your own sub-directory to the locale/
686 subdirectory to add a new language to your system. You'll need to
687 compile the ".po" files into ".mo" files, however.
689 Contributions of translation information to Laconica are very easy:
690 you can use the Web interface at http://laconi.ca/pootle/ to add one
691 or a few or lots of new translations -- or even new languages. You can
692 also download more up-to-date .po files there, if you so desire.
697 There is no built-in system for doing backups in Laconica. You can make
698 backups of a working Laconica system by backing up the database and
699 the Web directory. To backup the database use mysqldump <http://ur1.ca/7xo>
700 and to backup the Web directory, try tar.
705 The administrator can set the "private" flag for a site so that it's
706 not visible to non-logged-in users. This might be useful for
707 workgroups who want to share a microblogging site for project
708 management, but host it on a public server.
710 Note that this is an experimental feature; total privacy is not
711 guaranteed or ensured. Also, privacy is all-or-nothing for a site; you
712 can't have some accounts or notices private, and others public.
713 Finally, the interaction of private sites with OpenMicroBlogging is
714 undefined. Remote users won't be able to subscribe to users on a
715 private site, but users of the private site may be able to subscribe
716 to users on a remote site. (Or not... it's not well tested.) The
717 "proper behaviour" hasn't been defined here, so handle with care.
722 If you've been using Laconica 0.6, 0.5 or lower, or if you've been
723 tracking the "git" version of the software, you will probably want
724 to upgrade and keep your existing data. There is no automated upgrade
725 procedure in Laconica 0.7.1. Try these step-by-step instructions; read
726 to the end first before trying them.
728 0. Download Laconica and set up all the prerequisites as if you were
730 1. Make backups of both your database and your Web directory. UNDER NO
731 CIRCUMSTANCES should you try to do an upgrade without a known-good
732 backup. You have been warned.
733 2. Shut down Web access to your site, either by turning off your Web
734 server or by redirecting all pages to a "sorry, under maintenance"
736 3. Shut down XMPP access to your site, typically by shutting down the
737 xmppdaemon.php process and all other daemons that you're running.
738 If you've got "monit" or "cron" automatically restarting your
739 daemons, make sure to turn that off, too.
740 4. Shut down SMS and email access to your site. The easy way to do
741 this is to comment out the line piping incoming email to your
742 maildaemon.php file, and running something like "newaliases".
743 5. Once all writing processes to your site are turned off, make a
744 final backup of the Web directory and database.
745 6. Move your Laconica directory to a backup spot, like "mublog.bak".
746 7. Unpack your Laconica 0.6 tarball and move it to "mublog" or
747 wherever your code used to be.
748 8. Copy the config.php file and avatar directory from your old
749 directory to your new directory.
750 9. Copy htaccess.sample to .htaccess in the new directory. Change the
751 RewriteBase to use the correct path.
752 10. Rebuild the database. Go to your Laconica directory and run the
753 rebuilddb.sh script like this:
755 ./scripts/rebuilddb.sh rootuser rootpassword database db/laconica.sql
757 Here, rootuser and rootpassword are the username and password for a
758 user who can drop and create databases as well as tables; typically
759 that's _not_ the user Laconica runs as.
760 11. Use mysql client to log into your database and make sure that the
761 notice, user, profile, subscription etc. tables are non-empty.
762 12. Turn back on the Web server, and check that things still work.
763 13. Turn back on XMPP bots and email maildaemon. Note that the XMPP
764 bots have changed since version 0.5; see above for details.
766 If you're upgrading from very old versions, you may want to look at
767 the fixup_* scripts in the scripts directories. These will store some
768 precooked data in the DB. All upgraders should check out the inboxes
771 NOTE: the database definition file, stoica.ini, has been renamed to
772 laconica.ini (since this is the recommended database name). If you
773 have a line in your config.php pointing to the old name, you'll need
779 Before version 0.6.2, the page showing all notices from people the
780 user is subscribed to ("so-and-so with friends") was calculated at run
781 time. Starting with 0.6.2, we have a new data structure for holding a
782 user's "notice inbox". (Note: distinct from the "message inbox", which
783 is the "inbox" tab in the UI. The notice inbox appears under the
786 Notices are added to the inbox when they're created. This speeds up
787 the query considerably, and also allows us the opportunity, in the
788 future, to add different kind of notices to an inbox -- like @-replies
789 or subscriptions to search terms or hashtags.
791 Notice inboxes are enabled by default for new installations. If you
792 are upgrading an existing site, this means that your users will see
793 empty "Personal" pages. The following steps will help you fix the
796 0. $config['inboxes']['enabled'] can be set to one of three values. If
797 you set it to 'false', the site will work as before. Support for this
798 will probably be dropped in future versions.
799 1. Setting the flag to 'transitional' means that you're in transition.
800 In this mode, the code will run the "new query" or the "old query"
801 based on whether the user's inbox has been updated.
802 2. After setting the flag to "transitional", you can run the
803 fixup_inboxes.php script to create the inboxes. You may want to set
804 the memory limit high. You can re-run it without ill effect.
805 3. When fixup_inboxes is finished, you can set the enabled flag to
808 Configuration options
809 =====================
811 The sole configuration file for Laconica (excepting configurations for
812 dependency software) is config.php in your Laconica directory. If you
813 edit any other file in the directory, like lib/common.php (where most
814 of the defaults are defined), you will lose your configuration options
815 in any upgrade, and you will wish that you had been more careful.
817 Starting with version 0.7.1, you can put config files in the
818 /etc/laconica/ directory on your server, if it exists. Config files
819 will be included in this order:
821 * /etc/laconica/laconica.php - server-wide config
822 * /etc/laconica/<servername>.php - for a virtual host
823 * /etc/laconica/<servername>_<pathname>.php - for a path
824 * INSTALLDIR/config.php - for a particular implementation
826 Almost all configuration options are made through a two-dimensional
827 associative array, cleverly named $config. A typical configuration
830 $config['section']['option'] = value;
832 For brevity, the following documentation describes each section and
838 This section is a catch-all for site-wide variables.
840 name: the name of your site, like 'YourCompany Microblog'.
841 server: the server part of your site's URLs, like 'example.net'.
842 path: The path part of your site's URLs, like 'mublog' or '/'
844 fancy: whether or not your site uses fancy URLs (see Fancy URLs
845 section above). Default is false.
846 logfile: full path to a file for Laconica to save logging
847 information to. You may want to use this if you don't have
849 locale_path: full path to the directory for locale data. Unless you
850 store all your locale data in one place, you probably
851 don't need to use this.
852 language: default language for your site. Defaults to US English.
853 languages: A list of languages supported on your site. Typically you'd
854 only change this if you wanted to disable support for one
856 "unset($config['site']['languages']['de'])" will disable
858 theme: Theme for your site (see Theme section). Two themes are
859 provided by default: 'default' and 'stoica' (the one used by
860 Identi.ca). It's appreciated if you don't use the 'stoica' theme
861 except as the basis for your own.
862 email: contact email address for your site. By default, it's extracted
863 from your Web server environment; you may want to customize it.
864 broughtbyurl: name of an organization or individual who provides the
865 service. Each page will include a link to this name in the
866 footer. A good way to link to the blog, forum, wiki,
867 corporate portal, or whoever is making the service available.
868 broughtby: text used for the "brought by" link.
869 timezone: default timezone for message display. Users can set their
870 own time zone. Defaults to 'UTC', which is a pretty good default.
871 closed: If set to 'true', will disallow registration on your site.
872 This is a cheap way to restrict accounts to only one
873 individual or group; just register the accounts you want on
874 the service, *then* set this variable to 'true'.
875 inviteonly: If set to 'true', will only allow registration if the user
876 was invited by an existing user.
877 private: If set to 'true', anonymous users will be redirected to the
878 'login' page. Also, API methods that normally require no
879 authentication will require it. Note that this does not turn
880 off registration; use 'closed' or 'inviteonly' for the
882 notice: A plain string that will appear on every page. A good place
883 to put introductory information about your service, or info about
884 upgrades and outages, or other community info. Any HTML will
890 This section is a reference to the configuration options for
891 DB_DataObject (see <http://ur1.ca/7xp>). The ones that you may want to
892 set are listed below for clarity.
894 database: a DSN (Data Source Name) for your Laconica database. This is
895 in the format 'protocol://username:password@hostname/databasename',
896 where 'protocol' is 'mysql' or 'mysqli' (or possibly 'postgresql', if you
897 really know what you're doing), 'username' is the username,
898 'password' is the password, and etc.
899 ini_yourdbname: if your database is not named 'laconica', you'll need
900 to set this to point to the location of the
901 laconica.ini file. Note that the real name of your database
902 should go in there, not literally 'yourdbname'.
903 db_driver: You can try changing this to 'MDB2' to use the other driver
904 type for DB_DataObject, but note that it breaks the OpenID
905 libraries, which only support PEAR::DB.
906 debug: On a database error, you may get a message saying to set this
907 value to 5 to see debug messages in the browser. This breaks
908 just about all pages, and will also expose the username and
910 quote_identifiers: Set this to true if you're using postgresql.
911 type: either 'mysql' or 'postgresql' (used for some bits of
912 database-type-specific SQL in the code). Defaults to mysql.
913 mirror: you can set this to an array of DSNs, like the above
914 'database' value. If it's set, certain read-only actions will
915 use a random value out of this array for the database, rather
916 than the one in 'database' (actually, 'database' is overwritten).
917 You can offload a busy DB server by setting up MySQL replication
918 and adding the slaves to this array. Note that if you want some
919 requests to go to the 'database' (master) server, you'll need
920 to include it in this array, too.
925 By default, Laconica sites log error messages to the syslog facility.
926 (You can override this using the 'logfile' parameter described above).
928 appname: The name that Laconica uses to log messages. By default it's
929 "laconica", but if you have more than one installation on the
930 server, you may want to change the name for each instance so
931 you can track log messages more easily.
936 You can configure the software to queue time-consuming tasks, like
937 sending out SMS email or XMPP messages, for off-line processing. See
938 'Queues and daemons' above for how to set this up.
940 enabled: Whether to uses queues. Defaults to false.
945 The default license to use for your users notices. The default is the
946 Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which is probably the right
947 choice for any public site. Note that some other servers will not
948 accept notices if you apply a stricter license than this.
950 url: URL of the license, used for links.
951 title: Title for the license, like 'Creative Commons Attribution 3.0'.
952 image: A button shown on each page for the license.
957 This is for configuring out-going email. We use PEAR's Mail module,
958 see: http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.mail.mail.factory.php
960 backend: the backend to use for mail, one of 'mail', 'sendmail', and
961 'smtp'. Defaults to PEAR's default, 'mail'.
962 params: if the mail backend requires any parameters, you can provide
963 them in an associative array.
968 This is for configuring nicknames in the service.
970 blacklist: an array of strings for usernames that may not be
971 registered. A default array exists for strings that are
972 used by Laconica (e.g. 'doc', 'main', 'avatar', 'theme')
973 but you may want to add others if you have other software
974 installed in a subdirectory of Laconica or if you just
975 don't want certain words used as usernames.
976 featured: an array of nicknames of 'featured' users of the site.
977 Can be useful to draw attention to well-known users, or
978 interesting people, or whatever.
983 For configuring avatar access.
985 server: If set, defines another server where avatars are stored in the
986 root directory. Note that the 'avatar' subdir still has to be
987 writeable. You'd typically use this to split HTTP requests on
988 the client to speed up page loading, either with another
989 virtual server or with an NFS or SAMBA share. Clients
990 typically only make 2 connections to a single server at a
991 time <http://ur1.ca/6ih>, so this can parallelize the job.
997 For configuring the public stream.
999 localonly: If set to true, only messages posted by users of this
1000 service (rather than other services, filtered through OMB)
1001 are shown in the public stream. Default true.
1002 blacklist: An array of IDs of users to hide from the public stream.
1003 Useful if you have someone making excessive Twitterfeed posts
1004 to the site, other kinds of automated posts, testing bots, etc.
1009 server: Like avatars, you can speed up page loading by pointing the
1010 theme file lookup to another server (virtual or real). The
1011 theme server's root path should map to the Laconica "theme"
1012 subdirectory. Defaults to NULL.
1017 For configuring the XMPP sub-system.
1019 enabled: Whether to accept and send messages by XMPP. Default false.
1020 server: server part of XMPP ID for update user.
1021 port: connection port for clients. Default 5222, which you probably
1022 shouldn't need to change.
1023 user: username for the client connection. Users will receive messages
1024 from 'user'@'server'.
1025 resource: a unique identifier for the connection to the server. This
1026 is actually used as a prefix for each XMPP component in the system.
1027 password: password for the user account.
1028 host: some XMPP domains are served by machines with a different
1029 hostname. (For example, @gmail.com GTalk users connect to
1030 talk.google.com). Set this to the correct hostname if that's the
1031 case with your server.
1032 encryption: Whether to encrypt the connection between Laconica and the
1033 XMPP server. Defaults to true, but you can get
1034 considerably better performance turning it off if you're
1035 connecting to a server on the same machine or on a
1037 debug: if turned on, this will make the XMPP library blurt out all of
1038 the incoming and outgoing messages as XML stanzas. Use as a
1039 last resort, and never turn it on if you don't have queues
1040 enabled, since it will spit out sensitive data to the browser.
1041 public: an array of JIDs to send _all_ notices to. This is useful for
1042 participating in third-party search and archiving services.
1047 Miscellaneous tagging stuff.
1049 dropoff: Decay factor for tag listing, in seconds.
1050 Defaults to exponential decay over ten days; you can twiddle
1051 with it to try and get better results for your site.
1056 For daemon processes.
1058 piddir: directory that daemon processes should write their PID file
1059 (process ID) to. Defaults to /var/run/, which is where this
1060 stuff should usually go on Unix-ish systems.
1061 user: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective user ID
1062 to this user before running. Probably a good idea, especially if
1063 you start the daemons as root. Note: user name, like 'daemon',
1065 group: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective group ID
1066 to this named group. Again, a name, not a numerical ID.
1071 You can get a significant boost in performance by caching some
1072 database data in memcached <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>.
1074 enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
1075 server: a string with the hostname of the memcached server. Can also
1076 be an array of hostnames, if you've got more than one server.
1081 You can get a significant boost in performance using Sphinx Search
1082 instead of your database server to search for users and notices.
1083 <http://sphinxsearch.com/>.
1085 enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
1086 server: a string with the hostname of the sphinx server.
1087 port: an integer with the port number of the sphinx server.
1092 A catch-all for integration with other systems.
1094 source: The name to use for the source of posts to Twitter. Defaults
1095 to 'laconica', but if you request your own source name from
1096 Twitter <http://twitter.com/help/request_source>, you can use
1097 that here instead. Status updates on Twitter will then have
1105 enabled: A three-valued flag for whether to use notice inboxes (see
1106 upgrading info above for notes about this change). Can be
1107 'false', 'true', or '"transitional"'.
1112 For notice-posting throttles.
1114 enabled: Whether to throttle posting. Defaults to false.
1115 count: Each user can make this many posts in 'timespan' seconds. So, if count
1116 is 100 and timespan is 3600, then there can be only 100 posts
1117 from a user every hour.
1118 timespan: see 'count'.
1125 banned: an array of usernames and/or profile IDs of 'banned' profiles.
1126 The site will reject any notices by these users -- they will
1127 not be accepted at all. (Compare with blacklisted users above,
1128 whose posts just won't show up in the public stream.)
1133 The primary output for Laconica is syslog, unless you configured a
1134 separate logfile. This is probably the first place to look if you're
1135 getting weird behaviour from Laconica.
1137 If you're tracking the unstable version of Laconica in the git
1138 repository (see below), and you get a compilation error ("unexpected
1139 T_STRING") in the browser, check to see that you don't have any
1140 conflicts in your code.
1142 If you upgraded to Laconica 0.7.1 without reading the "Notice inboxes"
1143 section above, and all your users' 'Personal' tabs are empty, read the
1144 "Notice inboxes" section above.
1149 These are some myths you may see on the Web about Laconica.
1150 Documentation from the core team about Laconica has been pretty
1151 sparse, so some backtracking and guesswork resulted in some incorrect
1154 - "Set $config['db']['debug'] = 5 to debug the database." This is an
1155 extremely bad idea. It's a tool built into DB_DataObject that will
1156 emit oodles of print lines directly to the browser of your users.
1157 Among these lines will be your database username and password. Do
1158 not enable this option on a production Web site for any reason.
1160 - "Edit dataobject.ini with the following settings..." dataobject.ini
1161 is a development file for the DB_DataObject framework and is not
1162 used by the running software. It was removed from the Laconica
1163 distribution because its presence was confusing. Do not bother
1164 configuring dataobject.ini, and do not put your database username
1165 and password into the file on a production Web server; unscrupulous
1166 persons may try to read it to get your passwords.
1171 If you're adventurous or impatient, you may want to install the
1172 development version of Laconica. To get it, use the git version
1173 control tool <http://git-scm.com/> like so:
1175 git clone http://laconi.ca/software/laconica.git
1177 To keep it up-to-date, use 'git pull'. Watch for conflicts!
1182 There are several ways to get more information about Laconica.
1184 * There is a mailing list for Laconica developers and admins at
1185 http://mail.laconi.ca/mailman/listinfo/laconica-dev
1186 * The #laconica IRC channel on freenode.net <http://www.freenode.net/>.
1187 * The Laconica wiki, http://laconi.ca/trac/
1192 * Microblogging messages to http://identi.ca/evan are very welcome.
1193 * Laconica's Trac server has a bug tracker for any defects you may find,
1194 or ideas for making things better. http://laconi.ca/trac/
1195 * e-mail to evan@identi.ca will usually be read and responded to very
1196 quickly, unless the question is really hard.
1201 The following is an incomplete list of developers who've worked on
1202 Laconi.ca. Apologies for any oversight; please let evan@identi.ca know
1203 if anyone's been overlooked in error.
1205 * Evan Prodromou, founder and lead developer, Control Yourself, Inc.
1206 * Zach Copley, Control Yourself, Inc.
1207 * Earle Martin, Control Yourself, Inc.
1208 * Marie-Claude Doyon, designer, Control Yourself, Inc.
1209 * Sarven Capadisli, Control Yourself, Inc.
1210 * Robin Millette, Control Yourself, Inc.
1221 * Tryggvi Björgvinsson
1225 * Ken Sheppardson (Trac server, man-about-town)
1226 * Tiago 'gouki' Faria (i18n managerx)
1229 Thanks also to the developers of our upstream library code and to the
1230 thousands of people who have tried out Identi.ca, installed Laconi.ca,
1231 told their friends, and built the Open Microblogging network to what