5 Laconica 0.7.2.1 ("Talk about the Passion")
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 and feature release since version 0.7.1,
75 released Feb 9 2009. Notable changes this version:
77 - First version of a web-based installer
78 - Use Net_URL_Mapper instead of mod_rewrite to map "fancy URLs",
79 for a much simpler installation and use of PATH_INFO on sites
80 that don't have mod_rewrite.
81 - A plugin framework for system events, to make it easier to build
83 - A plugin for Google Analytics
84 - A plugin to use blogspam.net to check notices for spam
85 - A plugin to send linkbacks for notices about blog posts
86 - Configurable check for duplicate notices in a specific time
89 - First implementation of Twitter Search API
90 - Add streamlined mobile device-friendly styles when enabled in config.
91 - A queue server for sending notices to Twitter
92 - A queue server for sending notices to Facebook
93 - A queue server for sending notices to a ping server
94 - Fixed a bug in nonces for OAuth in OpenMicroBlogging
95 - Fixed bugs in transfer of avatars in OpenMicroBlogging
96 - @-links go to permalinks for local users
97 - Better handling of DB errors (instead of dreaded DB_DataObject blank
99 - Initial version of an RPM spec file
100 - More consistent display of notices in notice search
101 - A stylesheet for printed output
102 - "Social graph" methods for Twitter API
103 - Documentation for the JavaScript badge
104 - Debugged a ton of problems that happened with E_NOTICE on
105 - Better caching in RSS feeds
106 - Optionally send email when an @-message is received
107 - Automatically add tags for every group message
108 - Add framebusting JavaScript to help avoid clickjacking attacks.
109 - Optionally ignore some notice sources for public page.
110 - Add default SMS carriers and notice sources to distribution file.
111 - Change titles to use mixed case instead of all uppercase.
112 - Use exceptions for error handling.
114 Changes in version 0.7.1:
116 - Vast improvement in auto-linking to URLs.
117 - Link to group search from user's group page
118 - Improved interface in Facebook application
119 - Fix bad redirects in delete notice
120 - Updated PostgreSQL database creation script
121 - Show filesize in avatar/logo upload
122 - Vastly improved avatar/logo upload
123 - Allow re-authentication with OpenID
124 - Correctly link hashtabs inside parens and brackets
125 - Group and avatar image transparency works
126 - Better handling of commands through the Web and Ajax channels
127 - Fix links for profile page feeds
128 - Fixed destroy method in API
129 - Fix endpoint of Connect menu when XMPP disabled
130 - Show number of group members
131 - Enable configuration files in /etc/laconica/
133 Changes in version 0.7.0:
135 - Support for groups. Users can join groups and send themed notices
136 to those groups. All other members of the group receive the notices.
137 - Laconica-specific extensions to the Twitter API.
138 - A Facebook application.
139 - A massive UI redesign. The HTML generated by Laconica has changed
140 significantly, to make theming easier and to give a more open look
141 by default. Also, sidebar.
142 - Massive code hygiene changes to move towards compliance with the PEAR
143 coding standards and to support the new UI redesign.
144 - Began the breakup of util.php -- moved about 30% of code to a views
146 - UI elements for statistical information (like top posters or most
147 popular groups) added in a sidebar.
148 - include Javascript badge by Kent Brewster.
149 - Updated online documentation.
150 - Cropping of user avatars using Jcrop.
151 - fix for Twitter bridge to not send "Expect:" headers.
152 - add 'dm' as a synonym for 'd' in commands.
153 - Upgrade upstream version of jQuery to 1.3.
154 - Upgrade upstream version of PHP-OpenID to 2.1.2.
155 - Move OpenMicroBlogging specification to its own repository.
156 - Make tag-based RSS streams work.
157 - Additional locales: Bulgarian, Catalan, Greek, Hebrew, simplified
158 Chinese, Telugu, Taiwanese Chinese, Vietnamese,
159 - PostgreSQL updates.
160 - Nasty bug in Twitter bridge that wouldn't verify with Twitter
165 The following software packages are *required* for this software to
168 - PHP 5.2.x. It may be possible to run this software on earlier
169 versions of PHP, but many of the functions used are only available
171 - MySQL 5.x. The Laconica database is stored, by default, in a MySQL
172 server. It has been primarily tested on 5.x servers, although it may
173 be possible to install on earlier (or later!) versions. The server
174 *must* support the MyISAM storage engine -- the default for most
175 MySQL servers -- *and* the InnoDB storage engine.
176 - A Web server. Preferably, you should have Apache 2.2.x with the
177 mod_rewrite extension installed and enabled.
179 Your PHP installation must include the following PHP extensions:
181 - Curl. This is for fetching files by HTTP.
182 - XMLWriter. This is for formatting XML and HTML output.
183 - MySQL. For accessing the database.
184 - GD. For scaling down avatar images.
185 - mbstring. For handling Unicode (UTF-8) encoded strings.
186 - gettext. For multiple languages. Default on many PHP installs.
188 For some functionality, you will also need the following extensions:
190 - Memcache. A client for the memcached server, which caches database
191 information in volatile memory. This is important for adequate
192 performance on high-traffic sites. You will also need a memcached
193 server to store the data in.
194 - Mailparse. Efficient parsing of email requires this extension.
195 Submission by email or SMS-over-email uses this extension.
196 - Sphinx Search. A client for the sphinx server, an alternative
197 to MySQL or Postgresql fulltext search. You will also need a
198 Sphinx server to serve the search queries.
200 You will almost definitely get 2-3 times better performance from your
201 site if you install a PHP bytecode cache/accelerator. Some well-known
202 examples are: eaccelerator, Turck mmcache, xcache, apc. Zend Optimizer
203 is a proprietary accelerator installed on some hosting sites.
208 A number of external PHP libraries are used to provide basic
209 functionality and optional functionality for your system. For your
210 convenience, they are available in the "extlib" directory of this
211 package, and you do not have to download and install them. However,
212 you may want to keep them up-to-date with the latest upstream version,
213 and the URLs are listed here for your convenience.
215 - DB_DataObject http://pear.php.net/package/DB_DataObject
216 - Validate http://pear.php.net/package/Validate
217 - OpenID from OpenIDEnabled (not the PEAR version!). We decided
218 to use the openidenabled.com version since it's more widely
219 implemented, and seems to be better supported.
220 http://openidenabled.com/php-openid/
221 - PEAR DB. Although this is an older data access system (new
222 packages should probably use PHP DBO), the OpenID libraries
223 depend on PEAR DB so we use it here, too. DB_DataObject can
224 also use PEAR MDB2, which may give you better performance
225 but won't work with OpenID.
226 http://pear.php.net/package/DB
227 - OAuth.php from http://oauth.googlecode.com/svn/code/php/
228 - markdown.php from http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/
229 - PEAR Mail, for sending out mail notifications
230 http://pear.php.net/package/Mail
231 - PEAR Net_SMTP, if you use the SMTP factory for notifications
232 http://pear.php.net/package/Net_SMTP
233 - PEAR Net_Socket, if you use the SMTP factory for notifications
234 http://pear.php.net/package/Net_Socket
235 - XMPPHP, the follow-up to Class.Jabber.php. Probably the best XMPP
236 library available for PHP. http://xmpphp.googlecode.com/. Note that
237 as of this writing the version of this library that is available in
238 the extlib directory is *significantly different* from the upstream
239 version (patches have been submitted). Upgrading to the upstream
240 version may render your Laconica site unable to send or receive XMPP
242 - Facebook library. Used for the Facebook application.
243 - PEAR Services_oEmbed. Used for some multimedia integration.
244 - PEAR HTTP_Request is an oEmbed dependency.
245 - PEAR Validat is an oEmbed dependency.e
246 - PEAR Net_URL is an oEmbed dependency.2
248 A design goal of Laconica is that the basic Web functionality should
249 work on even the most restrictive commercial hosting services.
250 However, additional functionality, such as receiving messages by
251 Jabber/GTalk, require that you be able to run long-running processes
252 on your account. In addition, posting by email or from SMS require
253 that you be able to install a mail filter in your mail server.
258 Installing the basic Laconica Web component is relatively easy,
259 especially if you've previously installed PHP/MySQL packages.
261 1. Unpack the tarball you downloaded on your Web server. Usually a
262 command like this will work:
264 tar zxf laconica-0.7.2.1.tar.gz
266 ...which will make a laconica-0.7.2.1 subdirectory in your current
267 directory. (If you don't have shell access on your Web server, you
268 may have to unpack the tarball on your local computer and FTP the
269 files to the server.)
271 2. Move the tarball to a directory of your choosing in your Web root
272 directory. Usually something like this will work:
274 mv laconica-0.7.2.1 /var/www/mublog
276 This will make your Laconica instance available in the mublog path of
277 your server, like "http://example.net/mublog". "microblog" or
278 "laconica" might also be good path names. If you know how to
279 configure virtual hosts on your web server, you can try setting up
280 "http://micro.example.net/" or the like.
282 3. Make your target directory writeable by the Web server.
284 chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/
286 On some systems, this will probably work:
288 chgrp www-data /var/www/mublog/
289 chmod g+w /var/www/mublog/
291 If your Web server runs as another user besides "www-data", try
292 that user's default group instead. As a last resort, you can create
293 a new group like "mublog" and add the Web server's user to the group.
295 4. You should also take this moment to make your avatar subdirectory
296 writeable by the Web server. An insecure way to do this is:
298 chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/avatar
300 You can also make the avatar directory writeable by the Web server
301 group, as noted above.
303 5. Create a database to hold your microblog data. Something like this
306 mysqladmin -u "username" --password="password" create laconica
308 Note that Laconica must have its own database; you can't share the
309 database with another program. You can name it whatever you want,
312 (If you don't have shell access to your server, you may need to use
313 a tool like PHPAdmin to create a database. Check your hosting
314 service's documentation for how to create a new MySQL database.)
316 6. Create a new database account that Laconica will use to access the
317 database. If you have shell access, this will probably work from the
320 GRANT ALL on laconica.*
321 TO 'lacuser'@'localhost'
322 IDENTIFIED BY 'lacpassword';
324 You should change 'lacuser' and 'lacpassword' to your preferred new
325 username and password. You may want to test logging in to MySQL as
328 7. In a browser, navigate to the Laconica install script; something like:
330 http://yourserver.example.com/mublog/install.php
332 Enter the database connection information and your site name. The
333 install program will configure your site and install the initial,
334 almost-empty database.
336 8. You should now be able to navigate to your microblog's main directory
337 and see the "Public Timeline", which will be empty. If not, magic
338 has happened! You can now register a new user, post some notices,
339 edit your profile, etc. However, you may want to wait to do that stuff
340 if you think you can set up "fancy URLs" (see below), since some
341 URLs are stored in the database.
346 By default, Laconica will use URLs that include the main PHP program's
347 name in them. For example, a user's home profile might be
350 http://example.org/mublog/index.php/mublog/fred
352 On certain systems that don't support this kind of syntax, they'll
355 http://example.org/mublog/index.php?p=mublog/fred
357 It's possible to configure the software so it looks like this instead:
359 http://example.org/mublog/fred
361 These "fancy URLs" are more readable and memorable for users. To use
362 fancy URLs, you must either have Apache 2.x with .htaccess enabled and
363 mod_redirect enabled, -OR- know how to configure "url redirection" in
366 1. Copy the htaccess.sample file to .htaccess in your Laconica
367 directory. Note: if you have control of your server's httpd.conf or
368 similar configuration files, it can greatly improve performance to
369 import the .htaccess file into your conf file instead. If you're
370 not sure how to do it, you may save yourself a lot of headache by
371 just leaving the .htaccess file.
373 2. Change the "RewriteBase" in the new .htaccess file to be the URL path
374 to your Laconica installation on your server. Typically this will
375 be the path to your Laconica directory relative to your Web root.
377 3. Add or uncomment or change a line in your config.php file so it says:
379 $config['site']['fancy'] = true;
381 You should now be able to navigate to a "fancy" URL on your server,
384 http://example.net/mublog/main/register
386 If you changed your HTTP server configuration, you may need to restart
392 To use a Sphinx server to search users and notices, you also need
393 to install, compile and enable the sphinx pecl extension for php on the
394 client side, which itself depends on the sphinx development files.
395 "pecl install sphinx" should take care of that. Add "extension=sphinx.so"
396 to your php.ini and reload apache to enable it.
398 You can update your MySQL or Postgresql databases to drop their fulltext
399 search indexes, since they're now provided by sphinx.
401 On the sphinx server side, a script reads the main database and build
402 the keyword index. A cron job reads the database and keeps the sphinx
403 indexes up to date. scripts/sphinx-cron.sh should be called by cron
404 every 5 minutes, for example. scripts/sphinx.sh is an init.d script
405 to start and stop the sphinx search daemon.
410 Laconica supports a cheap-and-dirty system for sending update messages
411 to mobile phones and for receiving updates from the mobile. Instead of
412 sending through the SMS network itself, which is costly and requires
413 buy-in from the wireless carriers, it simply piggybacks on the email
414 gateways that many carriers provide to their customers. So, SMS
415 configuration is essentially email configuration.
417 Each user sends to a made-up email address, which they keep a secret.
418 Incoming email that is "From" the user's SMS email address, and "To"
419 the users' secret email address on the site's domain, will be
420 converted to a notice and stored in the DB.
422 For this to work, there *must* be a domain or sub-domain for which all
423 (or most) incoming email can pass through the incoming mail filter.
425 1. Run the SQL script carrier.sql in your Laconica database. This will
428 mysql -u "lacuser" --password="lacpassword" laconica < db/carrier.sql
430 This will populate your database with a list of wireless carriers
431 that support email SMS gateways.
433 2. Make sure the maildaemon.php file is executable:
435 chmod +x scripts/maildaemon.php
437 Note that "daemon" is kind of a misnomer here; the script is more
438 of a filter than a daemon.
440 2. Edit /etc/aliases on your mail server and add the following line:
442 *: /path/to/laconica/scripts/maildaemon.php
444 3. Run whatever code you need to to update your aliases database. For
445 many mail servers (Postfix, Exim, Sendmail), this should work:
449 You may need to restart your mail server for the new database to
452 4. Set the following in your config.php file:
454 $config['mail']['domain'] = 'yourdomain.example.net';
456 At this point, post-by-email and post-by-SMS-gateway should work. Note
457 that if your mail server is on a different computer from your email
458 server, you'll need to have a full installation of Laconica, a working
459 config.php, and access to the Laconica database from the mail server.
464 XMPP (eXtended Message and Presence Protocol, <http://xmpp.org/>) is the
465 instant-messenger protocol that drives Jabber and GTalk IM. You can
466 distribute messages via XMPP using the system below; however, you
467 need to run the XMPP incoming daemon to allow incoming messages as
470 1. You may want to strongly consider setting up your own XMPP server.
471 Ejabberd, OpenFire, and JabberD are all Open Source servers.
472 Jabber, Inc. provides a high-performance commercial server.
474 2. You must register a Jabber ID (JID) with your new server. It helps
475 to choose a name like "update@example.com" or "notice" or something
476 similar. Alternately, your "update JID" can be registered on a
477 publicly-available XMPP service, like jabber.org or GTalk.
479 Laconica will not register the JID with your chosen XMPP server;
480 you need to do this manually, with an XMPP client like Gajim,
481 Telepathy, or Pidgin.im.
483 3. Configure your site's XMPP variables, as described below in the
484 configuration section.
486 On a default installation, your site can broadcast messages using
487 XMPP. Users won't be able to post messages using XMPP unless you've
488 got the XMPP daemon running. See 'Queues and daemons' below for how
489 to set that up. Also, once you have a sizable number of users, sending
490 a lot of SMS, OMB, and XMPP messages whenever someone posts a message
491 can really slow down your site; it may cause posting to timeout.
493 NOTE: stream_select(), a crucial function for network programming, is
494 broken on PHP 5.2.x less than 5.2.6 on amd64-based servers. We don't
495 work around this bug in Laconica; current recommendation is to move
496 off of amd64 to another server.
501 You can send *all* messages from your microblogging site to a
502 third-party service using XMPP. This can be useful for providing
503 search, indexing, bridging, or other cool services.
505 To configure a downstream site to receive your public stream, add
506 their "JID" (Jabber ID) to your config.php as follows:
508 $config['xmpp']['public'][] = 'downstream@example.net';
510 (Don't miss those square brackets at the end.) Note that your XMPP
511 broadcasting must be configured as mentioned above. Although you can
512 send out messages at "Web time", high-volume sites should strongly
513 consider setting up queues and daemons.
518 Some activities that Laconica needs to do, like broadcast OMB, SMS,
519 and XMPP messages, can be 'queued' and done by off-line bots instead.
520 For this to work, you must be able to run long-running offline
521 processes, either on your main Web server or on another server you
522 control. (Your other server will still need all the above
523 prerequisites, with the exception of Apache.) Installing on a separate
524 server is probably a good idea for high-volume sites.
526 1. You'll need the "CLI" (command-line interface) version of PHP
527 installed on whatever server you use.
529 2. If you're using a separate server for queues, install Laconica
530 somewhere on the server. You don't need to worry about the
531 .htaccess file, but make sure that your config.php file is close
532 to, or identical to, your Web server's version.
534 3. In your config.php files (both the Web server and the queues
535 server!), set the following variable:
537 $config['queue']['enabled'] = true;
539 You may also want to look at the 'daemon' section of this file for
540 more daemon options. Note that if you set the 'user' and/or 'group'
541 options, you'll need to create that user and/or group by hand.
542 They're not created automatically.
544 4. On the queues server, run the command scripts/startdaemons.sh. It
545 needs as a parameter the install path; if you run it from the
546 Laconica dir, "." should suffice.
548 This will run eight (for now) queue handlers:
550 * xmppdaemon.php - listens for new XMPP messages from users and stores
551 them as notices in the database.
552 * jabberqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
553 registered users who should receive them.
554 * publicqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
555 public feed listeners.
556 * ombqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to OpenMicroBlogging
557 recipients on foreign servers.
558 * smsqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to SMS-over-email addresses
560 * xmppconfirmhandler.php - sends confirmation messages to registered
562 * twitterqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to Twitter for user
563 who have opted to set up Twitter bridging.
564 * facebookqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to Facebook for users
565 of the built-in Facebook application.
567 Note that these queue daemons are pretty raw, and need your care. In
568 particular, they leak memory, and you may want to restart them on a
569 regular (daily or so) basis with a cron job. Also, if they lose
570 the connection to the XMPP server for too long, they'll simply die. It
571 may be a good idea to use a daemon-monitoring service, like 'monit',
572 to check their status and keep them running.
574 All the daemons write their process IDs (pids) to /var/run/ by
575 default. This can be useful for starting, stopping, and monitoring the
578 Twitter Friends Syncing
579 -----------------------
581 As of Laconica 0.6.3, users may set a flag in their settings ("Subscribe
582 to my Twitter friends here" under the Twitter tab) to have Laconica
583 attempt to locate and subscribe to "friends" (people they "follow") on
584 Twitter who also have accounts on your Laconica system, and who have
585 previously set up a link for automatically posting notices to Twitter.
587 Optionally, there is a script (./scripts/synctwitterfriends.php), meant
588 to be run periodically from a job scheduler (e.g.: cron under Unix), to
589 look for new additions to users' friends lists. Note that the friends
590 syncing only subscribes users to each other, it does not unsubscribe
591 users when they stop following each other on Twitter.
595 # Update Twitter friends subscriptions every half hour
596 0,30 * * * * /path/to/php /path/to/laconica/scripts/synctwitterfriends.php>&/dev/null
598 Built-in Facebook Application
599 -----------------------------
601 Laconica's Facebook application allows your users to automatically
602 update their Facebook statuses with their latest notices, invite
603 their friends to use the app (and thus your site), view their notice
604 timelines, and post notices -- all from within Facebook. The application
605 is built into Laconica and runs on your host. For automatic Facebook
606 status updating to work you will need to enable queuing and run the
607 facebookqueuehandler.php daemon (see the "Queues and daemons" section
610 Quick setup instructions*:
612 Install the Facebook Developer application on Facebook:
614 http://www.facebook.com/developers/
616 Use it to create a new application and generate an API key and secret.
617 Uncomment the Facebook app section of your config.php and copy in the
618 key and secret, e.g.:
620 # Config section for the built-in Facebook application
621 $config['facebook']['apikey'] = 'APIKEY';
622 $config['facebook']['secret'] = 'SECRET';
624 In Facebook's application editor, specify the following URLs for your app:
626 - Callback URL: http://example.net/mublog/facebook/
627 - Post-Remove URL: http://example.net/mublog/facebook/remove
628 - Post-Add Redirect URL: http://apps.facebook.com/yourapp/
629 - Canvas URL: http://apps.facebook.com/yourapp/
631 (Replace 'example.net' with your host's URL, 'mublog' with the path
632 to your Laconica installation, and 'yourapp' with the name of the
633 Facebook application you created.)
635 Additionally, Choose "Web" for Application type in the Advanced tab.
636 In the "Canvas setting" section, choose the "FBML" for Render Method,
637 "Smart Size" for IFrame size, and "Full width (760px)" for Canvas Width.
638 Everything else can be left with default values.
640 *For more detailed instructions please see the installation guide on the
643 http://laconi.ca/trac/wiki/FacebookApplication
648 Sitemap files <http://sitemaps.org/> are a very nice way of telling
649 search engines and other interested bots what's available on your site
650 and what's changed recently. You can generate sitemap files for your
653 1. Choose your sitemap URL layout. Laconica creates a number of
654 sitemap XML files for different parts of your site. You may want to
655 put these in a sub-directory of your Laconica directory to avoid
656 clutter. The sitemap index file tells the search engines and other
657 bots where to find all the sitemap files; it *must* be in the main
658 installation directory or higher. Both types of file must be
659 available through HTTP.
661 2. To generate your sitemaps, run the following command on your server:
663 php scripts/sitemap.php -f index-file-path -d sitemap-directory -u URL-prefix-for-sitemaps
665 Here, index-file-path is the full path to the sitemap index file,
666 like './sitemapindex.xml'. sitemap-directory is the directory where
667 you want the sitemaps stored, like './sitemaps/' (make sure the dir
668 exists). URL-prefix-for-sitemaps is the full URL for the sitemap dir,
669 typically something like <http://example.net/mublog/sitemaps/>.
671 You can use several methods for submitting your sitemap index to
672 search engines to get your site indexed. One is to add a line like the
673 following to your robots.txt file:
675 Sitemap: /mublog/sitemapindex.xml
677 This is a good idea for letting *all* Web spiders know about your
678 sitemap. You can also submit sitemap files to major search engines
679 using their respective "Webmaster centres"; see sitemaps.org for links
685 There are two themes shipped with this version of Laconica: "identica",
686 which is what the Identi.ca site uses, and "default", which is a good
687 basis for other sites.
689 As of right now, your ability to change the theme is site-wide; users
690 can't choose their own theme. Additionally, the only thing you can
691 change in the theme is CSS stylesheets and some image files; you can't
692 change the HTML output, like adding or removing menu items.
694 You can choose a theme using the $config['site']['theme'] element in
695 the config.php file. See below for details.
697 You can add your own theme by making a sub-directory of the 'theme'
698 subdirectory with the name of your theme. Each theme can have the
701 display.css: a CSS2 file for "default" styling for all browsers.
702 ie6.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
704 ie7.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
706 logo.png: a logo image for the site.
707 default-avatar-profile.png: a 96x96 pixel image to use as the avatar for
708 users who don't upload their own.
709 default-avatar-stream.png: Ditto, but 48x48. For streams of notices.
710 default-avatar-mini.png: Ditto ditto, but 24x24. For subscriptions
711 listing on profile pages.
713 You may want to start by copying the files from the default theme to
716 NOTE: the HTML generated by Laconica changed *radically* between
717 version 0.6.x and 0.7.x. Older themes will need signification
718 modification to use the new output format.
723 Translations in Laconica use the gettext system <http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/>.
724 Theoretically, you can add your own sub-directory to the locale/
725 subdirectory to add a new language to your system. You'll need to
726 compile the ".po" files into ".mo" files, however.
728 Contributions of translation information to Laconica are very easy:
729 you can use the Web interface at http://laconi.ca/pootle/ to add one
730 or a few or lots of new translations -- or even new languages. You can
731 also download more up-to-date .po files there, if you so desire.
736 There is no built-in system for doing backups in Laconica. You can make
737 backups of a working Laconica system by backing up the database and
738 the Web directory. To backup the database use mysqldump <http://ur1.ca/7xo>
739 and to backup the Web directory, try tar.
744 The administrator can set the "private" flag for a site so that it's
745 not visible to non-logged-in users. This might be useful for
746 workgroups who want to share a microblogging site for project
747 management, but host it on a public server.
749 Note that this is an experimental feature; total privacy is not
750 guaranteed or ensured. Also, privacy is all-or-nothing for a site; you
751 can't have some accounts or notices private, and others public.
752 Finally, the interaction of private sites with OpenMicroBlogging is
753 undefined. Remote users won't be able to subscribe to users on a
754 private site, but users of the private site may be able to subscribe
755 to users on a remote site. (Or not... it's not well tested.) The
756 "proper behaviour" hasn't been defined here, so handle with care.
761 If you've been using Laconica 0.6, 0.5 or lower, or if you've been
762 tracking the "git" version of the software, you will probably want
763 to upgrade and keep your existing data. There is no automated upgrade
764 procedure in Laconica 0.7.2.1. Try these step-by-step instructions; read
765 to the end first before trying them.
767 0. Download Laconica and set up all the prerequisites as if you were
769 1. Make backups of both your database and your Web directory. UNDER NO
770 CIRCUMSTANCES should you try to do an upgrade without a known-good
771 backup. You have been warned.
772 2. Shut down Web access to your site, either by turning off your Web
773 server or by redirecting all pages to a "sorry, under maintenance"
775 3. Shut down XMPP access to your site, typically by shutting down the
776 xmppdaemon.php process and all other daemons that you're running.
777 If you've got "monit" or "cron" automatically restarting your
778 daemons, make sure to turn that off, too.
779 4. Shut down SMS and email access to your site. The easy way to do
780 this is to comment out the line piping incoming email to your
781 maildaemon.php file, and running something like "newaliases".
782 5. Once all writing processes to your site are turned off, make a
783 final backup of the Web directory and database.
784 6. Move your Laconica directory to a backup spot, like "mublog.bak".
785 7. Unpack your Laconica 0.6 tarball and move it to "mublog" or
786 wherever your code used to be.
787 8. Copy the config.php file and avatar directory from your old
788 directory to your new directory.
789 9. Copy htaccess.sample to .htaccess in the new directory. Change the
790 RewriteBase to use the correct path.
791 10. Rebuild the database. For MySQL, go to your Laconica directory and
792 run the rebuilddb.sh script like this:
794 ./scripts/rebuilddb.sh rootuser rootpassword database db/laconica.sql
796 Here, rootuser and rootpassword are the username and password for a
797 user who can drop and create databases as well as tables; typically
798 that's _not_ the user Laconica runs as.
799 For PostgreSQL databases there is an equivalent, rebuilddb_psql.sh,
800 which operates slightly differently. Read the documentation in that
801 script before running it.
802 11. Use mysql or psql client to log into your database and make sure that
803 the notice, user, profile, subscription etc. tables are non-empty.
804 12. Turn back on the Web server, and check that things still work.
805 13. Turn back on XMPP bots and email maildaemon. Note that the XMPP
806 bots have changed since version 0.5; see above for details.
808 If you're upgrading from very old versions, you may want to look at
809 the fixup_* scripts in the scripts directories. These will store some
810 precooked data in the DB. All upgraders should check out the inboxes
813 NOTE: the database definition file, stoica.ini, has been renamed to
814 laconica.ini (since this is the recommended database name). If you
815 have a line in your config.php pointing to the old name, you'll need
821 Before version 0.6.2, the page showing all notices from people the
822 user is subscribed to ("so-and-so with friends") was calculated at run
823 time. Starting with 0.6.2, we have a new data structure for holding a
824 user's "notice inbox". (Note: distinct from the "message inbox", which
825 is the "inbox" tab in the UI. The notice inbox appears under the
828 Notices are added to the inbox when they're created. This speeds up
829 the query considerably, and also allows us the opportunity, in the
830 future, to add different kind of notices to an inbox -- like @-replies
831 or subscriptions to search terms or hashtags.
833 Notice inboxes are enabled by default for new installations. If you
834 are upgrading an existing site, this means that your users will see
835 empty "Personal" pages. The following steps will help you fix the
838 0. $config['inboxes']['enabled'] can be set to one of three values. If
839 you set it to 'false', the site will work as before. Support for this
840 will probably be dropped in future versions.
841 1. Setting the flag to 'transitional' means that you're in transition.
842 In this mode, the code will run the "new query" or the "old query"
843 based on whether the user's inbox has been updated.
844 2. After setting the flag to "transitional", you can run the
845 fixup_inboxes.php script to create the inboxes. You may want to set
846 the memory limit high. You can re-run it without ill effect.
847 3. When fixup_inboxes is finished, you can set the enabled flag to
850 Configuration options
851 =====================
853 The sole configuration file for Laconica (excepting configurations for
854 dependency software) is config.php in your Laconica directory. If you
855 edit any other file in the directory, like lib/common.php (where most
856 of the defaults are defined), you will lose your configuration options
857 in any upgrade, and you will wish that you had been more careful.
859 Starting with version 0.7.1, you can put config files in the
860 /etc/laconica/ directory on your server, if it exists. Config files
861 will be included in this order:
863 * /etc/laconica/laconica.php - server-wide config
864 * /etc/laconica/<servername>.php - for a virtual host
865 * /etc/laconica/<servername>_<pathname>.php - for a path
866 * INSTALLDIR/config.php - for a particular implementation
868 Almost all configuration options are made through a two-dimensional
869 associative array, cleverly named $config. A typical configuration
872 $config['section']['option'] = value;
874 For brevity, the following documentation describes each section and
880 This section is a catch-all for site-wide variables.
882 name: the name of your site, like 'YourCompany Microblog'.
883 server: the server part of your site's URLs, like 'example.net'.
884 path: The path part of your site's URLs, like 'mublog' or ''
886 fancy: whether or not your site uses fancy URLs (see Fancy URLs
887 section above). Default is false.
888 logfile: full path to a file for Laconica to save logging
889 information to. You may want to use this if you don't have
891 locale_path: full path to the directory for locale data. Unless you
892 store all your locale data in one place, you probably
893 don't need to use this.
894 language: default language for your site. Defaults to US English.
895 languages: A list of languages supported on your site. Typically you'd
896 only change this if you wanted to disable support for one
898 "unset($config['site']['languages']['de'])" will disable
900 theme: Theme for your site (see Theme section). Two themes are
901 provided by default: 'default' and 'stoica' (the one used by
902 Identi.ca). It's appreciated if you don't use the 'stoica' theme
903 except as the basis for your own.
904 email: contact email address for your site. By default, it's extracted
905 from your Web server environment; you may want to customize it.
906 broughtbyurl: name of an organization or individual who provides the
907 service. Each page will include a link to this name in the
908 footer. A good way to link to the blog, forum, wiki,
909 corporate portal, or whoever is making the service available.
910 broughtby: text used for the "brought by" link.
911 timezone: default timezone for message display. Users can set their
912 own time zone. Defaults to 'UTC', which is a pretty good default.
913 closed: If set to 'true', will disallow registration on your site.
914 This is a cheap way to restrict accounts to only one
915 individual or group; just register the accounts you want on
916 the service, *then* set this variable to 'true'.
917 inviteonly: If set to 'true', will only allow registration if the user
918 was invited by an existing user.
919 private: If set to 'true', anonymous users will be redirected to the
920 'login' page. Also, API methods that normally require no
921 authentication will require it. Note that this does not turn
922 off registration; use 'closed' or 'inviteonly' for the
924 notice: A plain string that will appear on every page. A good place
925 to put introductory information about your service, or info about
926 upgrades and outages, or other community info. Any HTML will
928 dupelimit: Time in which it's not OK for the same person to post the
929 same notice; default = 60 seconds.
930 logo: URL of an image file to use as the logo for the site. Overrides
931 the logo in the theme, if any.
932 ssl: Whether to use SSL and https:// URLs for some or all pages.
933 Possible values are 'always' (use it for all pages), 'never'
934 (don't use it for any pages), or 'sometimes' (use it for
935 sensitive pages that include passwords like login and registration,
936 but not for regular pages). Default to 'never'.
937 sslserver: use an alternate server name for SSL URLs, like
938 'secure.example.org'. You should be careful to set cookie
939 parameters correctly so that both the SSL server and the
940 "normal" server can access the session cookie and
941 preferably other cookies as well.
946 This section is a reference to the configuration options for
947 DB_DataObject (see <http://ur1.ca/7xp>). The ones that you may want to
948 set are listed below for clarity.
950 database: a DSN (Data Source Name) for your Laconica database. This is
951 in the format 'protocol://username:password@hostname/databasename',
952 where 'protocol' is 'mysql' or 'mysqli' (or possibly 'postgresql', if you
953 really know what you're doing), 'username' is the username,
954 'password' is the password, and etc.
955 ini_yourdbname: if your database is not named 'laconica', you'll need
956 to set this to point to the location of the
957 laconica.ini file. Note that the real name of your database
958 should go in there, not literally 'yourdbname'.
959 db_driver: You can try changing this to 'MDB2' to use the other driver
960 type for DB_DataObject, but note that it breaks the OpenID
961 libraries, which only support PEAR::DB.
962 debug: On a database error, you may get a message saying to set this
963 value to 5 to see debug messages in the browser. This breaks
964 just about all pages, and will also expose the username and
966 quote_identifiers: Set this to true if you're using postgresql.
967 type: either 'mysql' or 'postgresql' (used for some bits of
968 database-type-specific SQL in the code). Defaults to mysql.
969 mirror: you can set this to an array of DSNs, like the above
970 'database' value. If it's set, certain read-only actions will
971 use a random value out of this array for the database, rather
972 than the one in 'database' (actually, 'database' is overwritten).
973 You can offload a busy DB server by setting up MySQL replication
974 and adding the slaves to this array. Note that if you want some
975 requests to go to the 'database' (master) server, you'll need
976 to include it in this array, too.
981 By default, Laconica sites log error messages to the syslog facility.
982 (You can override this using the 'logfile' parameter described above).
984 appname: The name that Laconica uses to log messages. By default it's
985 "laconica", but if you have more than one installation on the
986 server, you may want to change the name for each instance so
987 you can track log messages more easily.
992 You can configure the software to queue time-consuming tasks, like
993 sending out SMS email or XMPP messages, for off-line processing. See
994 'Queues and daemons' above for how to set this up.
996 enabled: Whether to uses queues. Defaults to false.
1001 The default license to use for your users notices. The default is the
1002 Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which is probably the right
1003 choice for any public site. Note that some other servers will not
1004 accept notices if you apply a stricter license than this.
1006 url: URL of the license, used for links.
1007 title: Title for the license, like 'Creative Commons Attribution 3.0'.
1008 image: A button shown on each page for the license.
1013 This is for configuring out-going email. We use PEAR's Mail module,
1014 see: http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.mail.mail.factory.php
1016 backend: the backend to use for mail, one of 'mail', 'sendmail', and
1017 'smtp'. Defaults to PEAR's default, 'mail'.
1018 params: if the mail backend requires any parameters, you can provide
1019 them in an associative array.
1024 This is for configuring nicknames in the service.
1026 blacklist: an array of strings for usernames that may not be
1027 registered. A default array exists for strings that are
1028 used by Laconica (e.g. 'doc', 'main', 'avatar', 'theme')
1029 but you may want to add others if you have other software
1030 installed in a subdirectory of Laconica or if you just
1031 don't want certain words used as usernames.
1032 featured: an array of nicknames of 'featured' users of the site.
1033 Can be useful to draw attention to well-known users, or
1034 interesting people, or whatever.
1039 For configuring avatar access.
1041 server: If set, defines another server where avatars are stored in the
1042 root directory. Note that the 'avatar' subdir still has to be
1043 writeable. You'd typically use this to split HTTP requests on
1044 the client to speed up page loading, either with another
1045 virtual server or with an NFS or SAMBA share. Clients
1046 typically only make 2 connections to a single server at a
1047 time <http://ur1.ca/6ih>, so this can parallelize the job.
1053 For configuring the public stream.
1055 localonly: If set to true, only messages posted by users of this
1056 service (rather than other services, filtered through OMB)
1057 are shown in the public stream. Default true.
1058 blacklist: An array of IDs of users to hide from the public stream.
1059 Useful if you have someone making excessive Twitterfeed posts
1060 to the site, other kinds of automated posts, testing bots, etc.
1065 server: Like avatars, you can speed up page loading by pointing the
1066 theme file lookup to another server (virtual or real). The
1067 theme server's root path should map to the Laconica "theme"
1068 subdirectory. Defaults to NULL.
1073 For configuring the XMPP sub-system.
1075 enabled: Whether to accept and send messages by XMPP. Default false.
1076 server: server part of XMPP ID for update user.
1077 port: connection port for clients. Default 5222, which you probably
1078 shouldn't need to change.
1079 user: username for the client connection. Users will receive messages
1080 from 'user'@'server'.
1081 resource: a unique identifier for the connection to the server. This
1082 is actually used as a prefix for each XMPP component in the system.
1083 password: password for the user account.
1084 host: some XMPP domains are served by machines with a different
1085 hostname. (For example, @gmail.com GTalk users connect to
1086 talk.google.com). Set this to the correct hostname if that's the
1087 case with your server.
1088 encryption: Whether to encrypt the connection between Laconica and the
1089 XMPP server. Defaults to true, but you can get
1090 considerably better performance turning it off if you're
1091 connecting to a server on the same machine or on a
1093 debug: if turned on, this will make the XMPP library blurt out all of
1094 the incoming and outgoing messages as XML stanzas. Use as a
1095 last resort, and never turn it on if you don't have queues
1096 enabled, since it will spit out sensitive data to the browser.
1097 public: an array of JIDs to send _all_ notices to. This is useful for
1098 participating in third-party search and archiving services.
1103 Miscellaneous tagging stuff.
1105 dropoff: Decay factor for tag listing, in seconds.
1106 Defaults to exponential decay over ten days; you can twiddle
1107 with it to try and get better results for your site.
1112 For daemon processes.
1114 piddir: directory that daemon processes should write their PID file
1115 (process ID) to. Defaults to /var/run/, which is where this
1116 stuff should usually go on Unix-ish systems.
1117 user: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective user ID
1118 to this user before running. Probably a good idea, especially if
1119 you start the daemons as root. Note: user name, like 'daemon',
1121 group: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective group ID
1122 to this named group. Again, a name, not a numerical ID.
1127 You can get a significant boost in performance by caching some
1128 database data in memcached <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>.
1130 enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
1131 server: a string with the hostname of the memcached server. Can also
1132 be an array of hostnames, if you've got more than one server.
1137 You can get a significant boost in performance using Sphinx Search
1138 instead of your database server to search for users and notices.
1139 <http://sphinxsearch.com/>.
1141 enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
1142 server: a string with the hostname of the sphinx server.
1143 port: an integer with the port number of the sphinx server.
1148 A catch-all for integration with other systems.
1150 source: The name to use for the source of posts to Twitter. Defaults
1151 to 'laconica', but if you request your own source name from
1152 Twitter <http://twitter.com/help/request_source>, you can use
1153 that here instead. Status updates on Twitter will then have
1161 enabled: A three-valued flag for whether to use notice inboxes (see
1162 upgrading info above for notes about this change). Can be
1163 'false', 'true', or '"transitional"'.
1168 For notice-posting throttles.
1170 enabled: Whether to throttle posting. Defaults to false.
1171 count: Each user can make this many posts in 'timespan' seconds. So, if count
1172 is 100 and timespan is 3600, then there can be only 100 posts
1173 from a user every hour.
1174 timespan: see 'count'.
1181 banned: an array of usernames and/or profile IDs of 'banned' profiles.
1182 The site will reject any notices by these users -- they will
1183 not be accepted at all. (Compare with blacklisted users above,
1184 whose posts just won't show up in the public stream.)
1189 Options with new users.
1191 subscribe: nickname of a user account to automatically subscribe new
1192 users to. Typically this would be system account for e.g.
1193 service updates or announcements. Users are able to unsub
1194 if they want. Default is null; no auto subscribe.
1195 welcome: nickname of a user account that sends welcome messages to new
1196 users. Can be the same as 'subscribe' account, although on
1197 busy servers it may be a good idea to keep that one just for
1198 'urgent' messages. Default is null; no message.
1203 The primary output for Laconica is syslog, unless you configured a
1204 separate logfile. This is probably the first place to look if you're
1205 getting weird behaviour from Laconica.
1207 If you're tracking the unstable version of Laconica in the git
1208 repository (see below), and you get a compilation error ("unexpected
1209 T_STRING") in the browser, check to see that you don't have any
1210 conflicts in your code.
1212 If you upgraded to Laconica 0.7.2.1 without reading the "Notice inboxes"
1213 section above, and all your users' 'Personal' tabs are empty, read the
1214 "Notice inboxes" section above.
1219 These are some myths you may see on the Web about Laconica.
1220 Documentation from the core team about Laconica has been pretty
1221 sparse, so some backtracking and guesswork resulted in some incorrect
1224 - "Set $config['db']['debug'] = 5 to debug the database." This is an
1225 extremely bad idea. It's a tool built into DB_DataObject that will
1226 emit oodles of print lines directly to the browser of your users.
1227 Among these lines will be your database username and password. Do
1228 not enable this option on a production Web site for any reason.
1230 - "Edit dataobject.ini with the following settings..." dataobject.ini
1231 is a development file for the DB_DataObject framework and is not
1232 used by the running software. It was removed from the Laconica
1233 distribution because its presence was confusing. Do not bother
1234 configuring dataobject.ini, and do not put your database username
1235 and password into the file on a production Web server; unscrupulous
1236 persons may try to read it to get your passwords.
1241 If you're adventurous or impatient, you may want to install the
1242 development version of Laconica. To get it, use the git version
1243 control tool <http://git-scm.com/> like so:
1245 git clone http://laconi.ca/software/laconica.git
1247 To keep it up-to-date, use 'git pull'. Watch for conflicts!
1252 There are several ways to get more information about Laconica.
1254 * There is a mailing list for Laconica developers and admins at
1255 http://mail.laconi.ca/mailman/listinfo/laconica-dev
1256 * The #laconica IRC channel on freenode.net <http://www.freenode.net/>.
1257 * The Laconica wiki, http://laconi.ca/trac/
1262 * Microblogging messages to http://identi.ca/evan are very welcome.
1263 * Laconica's Trac server has a bug tracker for any defects you may find,
1264 or ideas for making things better. http://laconi.ca/trac/
1265 * e-mail to evan@identi.ca will usually be read and responded to very
1266 quickly, unless the question is really hard.
1271 The following is an incomplete list of developers who've worked on
1272 Laconi.ca. Apologies for any oversight; please let evan@identi.ca know
1273 if anyone's been overlooked in error.
1275 * Evan Prodromou, founder and lead developer, Control Yourself, Inc.
1276 * Zach Copley, Control Yourself, Inc.
1277 * Earle Martin, Control Yourself, Inc.
1278 * Marie-Claude Doyon, designer, Control Yourself, Inc.
1279 * Sarven Capadisli, Control Yourself, Inc.
1280 * Robin Millette, Control Yourself, Inc.
1291 * Tryggvi Björgvinsson
1295 * Ken Sheppardson (Trac server, man-about-town)
1296 * Tiago 'gouki' Faria (i18n managerx)
1298 * Leslie Michael Orchard
1302 Thanks also to the developers of our upstream library code and to the
1303 thousands of people who have tried out Identi.ca, installed Laconi.ca,
1304 told their friends, and built the Open Microblogging network to what