5 Laconica 0.7.0 ("Rockville")
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 major feature release, and includes some bug fixes from the
75 previous version (0.6.4, released December 14 2008.)
77 - Support for groups. Users can join groups and send themed notices
78 to those groups. All other members of the group receive the notices.
79 - Laconica-specific extensions to the Twitter API.
80 - A Facebook application.
81 - A massive UI redesign. The HTML generated by Laconica has changed
82 significantly, to make theming easier and to give a more open look
83 by default. Also, sidebar.
84 - Massive code hygiene changes to move towards compliance with the PEAR
85 coding standards and to support the new UI redesign.
86 - Began the breakup of util.php -- moved about 30% of code to a views
88 - UI elements for statistical information (like top posters or most
89 popular groups) added in a sidebar.
90 - include Javascript badge by Kent Brewster.
91 - Updated online documentation.
92 - Cropping of user avatars using Jcrop.
93 - fix for Twitter bridge to not send "Expect:" headers.
94 - add 'dm' as a synonym for 'd' in commands.
95 - Upgrade upstream version of jQuery to 1.3.
96 - Upgrade upstream version of PHP-OpenID to 2.1.2.
97 - Move OpenMicroBlogging specification to its own repository.
98 - Make tag-based RSS streams work.
99 - Additional locales: Bulgarian, Catalan, Greek, Hebrew, simplified
100 Chinese, Telugu, Taiwanese Chinese, Vietnamese,
101 - PostgreSQL updates.
102 - Nasty bug in Twitter bridge that wouldn't verify with Twitter
107 The following software packages are *required* for this software to
110 - PHP 5.2.x. It may be possible to run this software on earlier
111 versions of PHP, but many of the functions used are only available
113 - MySQL 5.x. The Laconica database is stored, by default, in a MySQL
114 server. It has been primarily tested on 5.x servers, although it may
115 be possible to install on earlier (or later!) versions. The server
116 *must* support the MyISAM storage engine -- the default for most
117 MySQL servers -- *and* the InnoDB storage engine.
118 - A Web server. Preferably, you should have Apache 2.2.x with the
119 mod_rewrite extension installed and enabled.
121 Your PHP installation must include the following PHP extensions:
123 - Curl. This is for fetching files by HTTP.
124 - XMLWriter. This is for formatting XML and HTML output.
125 - MySQL. For accessing the database.
126 - GD. For scaling down avatar images.
127 - mbstring. For handling Unicode (UTF-8) encoded strings.
128 - gettext. For multiple languages. Default on many PHP installs.
130 For some functionality, you will also need the following extensions:
132 - Memcache. A client for the memcached server, which caches database
133 information in volatile memory. This is important for adequate
134 performance on high-traffic sites. You will also need a memcached
135 server to store the data in.
136 - Mailparse. Efficient parsing of email requires this extension.
137 Submission by email or SMS-over-email uses this extension.
138 - Sphinx Search. A client for the sphinx server, an alternative
139 to MySQL or Postgresql fulltext search. You will also need a
140 Sphinx server to serve the search queries.
142 You will almost definitely get 2-3 times better performance from your
143 site if you install a PHP bytecode cache/accelerator. Some well-known
144 examples are: eaccelerator, Turck mmcache, xcache, apc. Zend Optimizer
145 is a proprietary accelerator installed on some hosting sites.
150 A number of external PHP libraries are used to provide basic
151 functionality and optional functionality for your system. For your
152 convenience, they are available in the "extlib" directory of this
153 package, and you do not have to download and install them. However,
154 you may want to keep them up-to-date with the latest upstream version,
155 and the URLs are listed here for your convenience.
157 - DB_DataObject http://pear.php.net/package/DB_DataObject
158 - Validate http://pear.php.net/package/Validate
159 - OpenID from OpenIDEnabled (not the PEAR version!). We decided
160 to use the openidenabled.com version since it's more widely
161 implemented, and seems to be better supported.
162 http://openidenabled.com/php-openid/
163 - PEAR DB. Although this is an older data access system (new
164 packages should probably use PHP DBO), the OpenID libraries
165 depend on PEAR DB so we use it here, too. DB_DataObject can
166 also use PEAR MDB2, which may give you better performance
167 but won't work with OpenID.
168 http://pear.php.net/package/DB
169 - OAuth.php from http://oauth.googlecode.com/svn/code/php/
170 - markdown.php from http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/
171 - PEAR Mail, for sending out mail notifications
172 http://pear.php.net/package/Mail
173 - PEAR Net_SMTP, if you use the SMTP factory for notifications
174 http://pear.php.net/package/Net_SMTP
175 - PEAR Net_Socket, if you use the SMTP factory for notifications
176 http://pear.php.net/package/Net_Socket
177 - XMPPHP, the follow-up to Class.Jabber.php. Probably the best XMPP
178 library available for PHP. http://xmpphp.googlecode.com/. Note that
179 as of this writing the version of this library that is available in
180 the extlib directory is *significantly different* from the upstream
181 version (patches have been submitted). Upgrading to the upstream
182 version may render your Laconica site unable to send or receive XMPP
184 - Facebook library. Used for the Facebook application.
186 A design goal of Laconica is that the basic Web functionality should
187 work on even the most restrictive commercial hosting services.
188 However, additional functionality, such as receiving messages by
189 Jabber/GTalk, require that you be able to run long-running processes
190 on your account. In addition, posting by email or from SMS require
191 that you be able to install a mail filter in your mail server.
196 Installing the basic Laconica Web component is relatively easy,
197 especially if you've previously installed PHP/MySQL packages.
199 1. Unpack the tarball you downloaded on your Web server. Usually a
200 command like this will work:
202 tar zxf laconica-0.7.0.tar.gz
204 ...which will make a laconica-0.7.0 subdirectory in your current
205 directory. (If you don't have shell access on your Web server, you
206 may have to unpack the tarball on your local computer and FTP the
207 files to the server.)
209 2. Move the tarball to a directory of your choosing in your Web root
210 directory. Usually something like this will work:
212 mv laconica-0.7.0 /var/www/mublog
214 This will make your Laconica instance available in the mublog path of
215 your server, like "http://example.net/mublog". "microblog" or
216 "laconica" might also be good path names. If you know how to
217 configure virtual hosts on your web server, you can try setting up
218 "http://micro.example.net/" or the like.
220 3. You should also take this moment to make your avatar subdirectory
221 writeable by the Web server. An insecure way to do this is:
223 chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/avatar
225 On some systems, this will probably work:
227 chgrp www-data /var/www/mublog/avatar
228 chmod g+w /var/www/mublog/avatar
230 If your Web server runs as another user besides "www-data", try
231 that user's default group instead. As a last resort, you can create
232 a new group like "avatar" and add the Web server's user to the group.
234 4. Create a database to hold your microblog data. Something like this
237 mysqladmin -u "username" --password="password" create laconica
239 Note that Laconica must have its own database; you can't share the
240 database with another program. You can name it whatever you want,
243 (If you don't have shell access to your server, you may need to use
244 a tool like PHPAdmin to create a database. Check your hosting
245 service's documentation for how to create a new MySQL database.)
247 5. Run the laconica.sql SQL script in the db subdirectory to create
248 the database tables in the database. A typical system would work
251 mysql -u "username" --password="password" laconica < /var/www/mublog/db/laconica.sql
253 You may want to test by logging into the database and checking that
254 the tables were created. Here's an example:
258 6. Create a new database account that Laconica will use to access the
259 database. If you have shell access, this will probably work from the
262 GRANT SELECT,INSERT,DELETE,UPDATE on laconica.*
263 TO 'lacuser'@'localhost'
264 IDENTIFIED BY 'lacpassword';
266 You should change 'lacuser' and 'lacpassword' to your preferred new
267 username and password. You may want to test logging in as this new
268 user and testing that you can SELECT from some of the tables in the
269 DB (use SHOW TABLES to see which ones are there).
271 7. Copy the config.php.sample in the Laconica directory to config.php.
273 8. Edit config.php to set the basic configuration for your system.
274 (See descriptions below for basic config options.) Note that there
275 are lots of options and if you try to do them all at once, you will
276 have a hard time making sure what's working and what's not. So,
277 stick with the basics at first. In particular, customizing the
278 'site' and 'db' settings will almost definitely be needed.
280 9. At this point, you should be able to navigate in a browser to your
281 microblog's main directory and see the "Public Timeline", which
282 will be empty. If not, magic has happened! You can now register a
283 new user, post some notices, edit your profile, etc. However, you
284 may want to wait to do that stuff if you think you can set up
285 "fancy URLs" (see below), since some URLs are stored in the database.
290 By default, Laconica will have big long sloppy URLs that are hard for
291 people to remember or use. For example, a user's home profile might be
294 http://example.org/mublog/index.php?action=showstream&nickname=fred
296 It's possible to configure the software so it looks like this instead:
298 http://example.org/mublog/fred
300 These "fancy URLs" are more readable and memorable for users. To use
301 fancy URLs, you must either have Apache 2.2.x with .htaccess enabled
302 and mod_redirect enabled, -OR- know how to configure "url redirection"
305 1. Copy the htaccess.sample file to .htaccess in your Laconica
306 directory. Note: if you have control of your server's httpd.conf or
307 similar configuration files, it can greatly improve performance to
308 import the .htaccess file into your conf file instead. If you're
309 not sure how to do it, you may save yourself a lot of headache by
310 just leaving the .htaccess file.
312 2. Change the "RewriteBase" in the new .htaccess file to be the URL path
313 to your Laconica installation on your server. Typically this will
314 be the path to your Laconica directory relative to your Web root.
316 3. Add or uncomment or change a line in your config.php file so it says:
318 $config['site']['fancy'] = true;
320 You should now be able to navigate to a "fancy" URL on your server,
323 http://example.net/mublog/main/register
325 If you changed your HTTP server configuration, you may need to restart
328 If you have problems with the .htaccess file on versions of Apache
329 earlier than 2.2.x, try changing the regular expressions in the
330 htaccess.sample file that use "\w" to just use ".".
335 To use a Sphinx server to search users and notices, you also need
336 to install, compile and enable the sphinx pecl extension for php on the
337 client side, which itself depends on the sphinx development files.
338 "pecl install sphinx" should take care of that. Add "extension=sphinx.so"
339 to your php.ini and reload apache to enable it.
341 You can update your MySQL or Postgresql databases to drop their fulltext
342 search indexes, since they're now provided by sphinx.
344 On the sphinx server side, a script reads the main database and build
345 the keyword index. A cron job reads the database and keeps the sphinx
346 indexes up to date. scripts/sphinx-cron.sh should be called by cron
347 every 5 minutes, for example. scripts/sphinx.sh is an init.d script
348 to start and stop the sphinx search daemon.
353 Laconica supports a cheap-and-dirty system for sending update messages
354 to mobile phones and for receiving updates from the mobile. Instead of
355 sending through the SMS network itself, which is costly and requires
356 buy-in from the wireless carriers, it simply piggybacks on the email
357 gateways that many carriers provide to their customers. So, SMS
358 configuration is essentially email configuration.
360 Each user sends to a made-up email address, which they keep a secret.
361 Incoming email that is "From" the user's SMS email address, and "To"
362 the users' secret email address on the site's domain, will be
363 converted to a notice and stored in the DB.
365 For this to work, there *must* be a domain or sub-domain for which all
366 (or most) incoming email can pass through the incoming mail filter.
368 1. Run the SQL script carrier.sql in your Laconica database. This will
371 mysql -u "lacuser" --password="lacpassword" laconica < db/carrier.sql
373 This will populate your database with a list of wireless carriers
374 that support email SMS gateways.
376 2. Make sure the maildaemon.php file is executable:
378 chmod +x scripts/maildaemon.php
380 Note that "daemon" is kind of a misnomer here; the script is more
381 of a filter than a daemon.
383 2. Edit /etc/aliases on your mail server and add the following line:
385 *: /path/to/laconica/scripts/maildaemon.php
387 3. Run whatever code you need to to update your aliases database. For
388 many mail servers (Postfix, Exim, Sendmail), this should work:
392 You may need to restart your mail server for the new database to
395 4. Set the following in your config.php file:
397 $config['mail']['domain'] = 'yourdomain.example.net';
399 At this point, post-by-email and post-by-SMS-gateway should work. Note
400 that if your mail server is on a different computer from your email
401 server, you'll need to have a full installation of Laconica, a working
402 config.php, and access to the Laconica database from the mail server.
407 XMPP (eXtended Message and Presence Protocol, <http://xmpp.org/>) is the
408 instant-messenger protocol that drives Jabber and GTalk IM. You can
409 distribute messages via XMPP using the system below; however, you
410 need to run the XMPP incoming daemon to allow incoming messages as
413 1. You may want to strongly consider setting up your own XMPP server.
414 Ejabberd, OpenFire, and JabberD are all Open Source servers.
415 Jabber, Inc. provides a high-performance commercial server.
417 2. You must register a Jabber ID (JID) with your new server. It helps
418 to choose a name like "update@example.com" or "notice" or something
419 similar. Alternately, your "update JID" can be registered on a
420 publicly-available XMPP service, like jabber.org or GTalk.
422 Laconica will not register the JID with your chosen XMPP server;
423 you need to do this manually, with an XMPP client like Gajim,
424 Telepathy, or Pidgin.im.
426 3. Configure your site's XMPP variables, as described below in the
427 configuration section.
429 On a default installation, your site can broadcast messages using
430 XMPP. Users won't be able to post messages using XMPP unless you've
431 got the XMPP daemon running. See 'Queues and daemons' below for how
432 to set that up. Also, once you have a sizable number of users, sending
433 a lot of SMS, OMB, and XMPP messages whenever someone posts a message
434 can really slow down your site; it may cause posting to timeout.
436 NOTE: stream_select(), a crucial function for network programming, is
437 broken on PHP 5.2.x less than 5.2.6 on amd64-based servers. We don't
438 work around this bug in Laconica; current recommendation is to move
439 off of amd64 to another server.
444 You can send *all* messages from your microblogging site to a
445 third-party service using XMPP. This can be useful for providing
446 search, indexing, bridging, or other cool services.
448 To configure a downstream site to receive your public stream, add
449 their "JID" (Jabber ID) to your config.php as follows:
451 $config['xmpp']['public'][] = 'downstream@example.net';
453 (Don't miss those square brackets at the end.) Note that your XMPP
454 broadcasting must be configured as mentioned above. Although you can
455 send out messages at "Web time", high-volume sites should strongly
456 consider setting up queues and daemons.
461 Some activities that Laconica needs to do, like broadcast OMB, SMS,
462 and XMPP messages, can be 'queued' and done by off-line bots instead.
463 For this to work, you must be able to run long-running offline
464 processes, either on your main Web server or on another server you
465 control. (Your other server will still need all the above
466 prerequisites, with the exception of Apache.) Installing on a separate
467 server is probably a good idea for high-volume sites.
469 1. You'll need the "CLI" (command-line interface) version of PHP
470 installed on whatever server you use.
472 2. If you're using a separate server for queues, install Laconica
473 somewhere on the server. You don't need to worry about the
474 .htaccess file, but make sure that your config.php file is close
475 to, or identical to, your Web server's version.
477 3. In your config.php files (both the Web server and the queues
478 server!), set the following variable:
480 $config['queue']['enabled'] = true;
482 You may also want to look at the 'daemon' section of this file for
483 more daemon options. Note that if you set the 'user' and/or 'group'
484 options, you'll need to create that user and/or group by hand.
485 They're not created automatically.
487 4. On the queues server, run the command scripts/startdaemons.sh. It
488 needs as a parameter the install path; if you run it from the
489 Laconica dir, "." should suffice.
491 This will run six (for now) queue handlers:
493 * xmppdaemon.php - listens for new XMPP messages from users and stores
494 them as notices in the database.
495 * jabberqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
496 registered users who should receive them.
497 * publicqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
498 public feed listeners.
499 * ombqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to OpenMicroBlogging
500 recipients on foreign servers.
501 * smsqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to SMS-over-email addresses
503 * xmppconfirmhandler.php - sends confirmation messages to registered
506 Note that these queue daemons are pretty raw, and need your care. In
507 particular, they leak memory, and you may want to restart them on a
508 regular (daily or so) basis with a cron job. Also, if they lose
509 the connection to the XMPP server for too long, they'll simply die. It
510 may be a good idea to use a daemon-monitoring service, like 'monit',
511 to check their status and keep them running.
513 All the daemons write their process IDs (pids) to /var/run/ by
514 default. This can be useful for starting, stopping, and monitoring the
517 Twitter Friends Syncing
518 -----------------------
520 As of Laconica 0.6.3, users may set a flag in their settings ("Subscribe
521 to my Twitter friends here" under the Twitter tab) to have Laconica
522 attempt to locate and subscribe to "friends" (people they "follow") on
523 Twitter who also have accounts on your Laconica system, and who have
524 previously set up a link for automatically posting notices to Twitter.
526 Optionally, there is a script (./scripts/synctwitterfriends.php), meant
527 to be run periodically from a job scheduler (e.g.: cron under Unix), to
528 look for new additions to users' friends lists. Note that the friends
529 syncing only subscribes users to each other, it does not unsubscribe
530 users when they stop following each other on Twitter.
534 # Update Twitter friends subscriptions every half hour
535 0,30 * * * * /path/to/php /path/to/laconica/scripts/synctwitterfriends.php>&/dev/null
540 Sitemap files <http://sitemaps.org/> are a very nice way of telling
541 search engines and other interested bots what's available on your site
542 and what's changed recently. You can generate sitemap files for your
545 1. Choose your sitemap URL layout. Laconica creates a number of
546 sitemap XML files for different parts of your site. You may want to
547 put these in a sub-directory of your Laconica directory to avoid
548 clutter. The sitemap index file tells the search engines and other
549 bots where to find all the sitemap files; it *must* be in the main
550 installation directory or higher. Both types of file must be
551 available through HTTP.
553 2. To generate your sitemaps, run the following command on your server:
555 php scripts/sitemap.php -f index-file-path -d sitemap-directory -u URL-prefix-for-sitemaps
557 Here, index-file-path is the full path to the sitemap index file,
558 like './sitemapindex.xml'. sitemap-directory is the directory where
559 you want the sitemaps stored, like './sitemaps/' (make sure the dir
560 exists). URL-prefix-for-sitemaps is the full URL for the sitemap dir,
561 typically something like <http://example.net/mublog/sitemaps/>.
563 You can use several methods for submitting your sitemap index to
564 search engines to get your site indexed. One is to add a line like the
565 following to your robots.txt file:
567 Sitemap: /mublog/sitemapindex.xml
569 This is a good idea for letting *all* Web spiders know about your
570 sitemap. You can also submit sitemap files to major search engines
571 using their respective "Webmaster centres"; see sitemaps.org for links
577 There are two themes shipped with this version of Laconica: "stoica",
578 which is what the Identi.ca site uses, and "default", which is a good
579 basis for other sites.
581 As of right now, your ability to change the theme is site-wide; users
582 can't choose their own theme. Additionally, the only thing you can
583 change in the theme is CSS stylesheets and some image files; you can't
584 change the HTML output, like adding or removing menu items.
586 You can choose a theme using the $config['site']['theme'] element in
587 the config.php file. See below for details.
589 You can add your own theme by making a sub-directory of the 'theme'
590 subdirectory with the name of your theme. Each theme can have the
593 display.css: a CSS2 file for "default" styling for all browsers.
594 ie6.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
596 ie7.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
598 logo.png: a logo image for the site.
599 default-avatar-profile.png: a 96x96 pixel image to use as the avatar for
600 users who don't upload their own.
601 default-avatar-stream.png: Ditto, but 48x48. For streams of notices.
602 default-avatar-mini.png: Ditto ditto, but 24x24. For subscriptions
603 listing on profile pages.
605 You may want to start by copying the files from the default theme to
608 NOTE: the HTML generated by Laconica changed *radically* between
609 version 0.6.x and 0.7.x. Older themes will need signification
610 modification to use the new output format.
615 Translations in Laconica use the gettext system <http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/>.
616 Theoretically, you can add your own sub-directory to the locale/
617 subdirectory to add a new language to your system. You'll need to
618 compile the ".po" files into ".mo" files, however.
620 Contributions of translation information to Laconica are very easy:
621 you can use the Web interface at http://laconi.ca/pootle/ to add one
622 or a few or lots of new translations -- or even new languages. You can
623 also download more up-to-date .po files there, if you so desire.
628 There is no built-in system for doing backups in Laconica. You can make
629 backups of a working Laconica system by backing up the database and
630 the Web directory. To backup the database use mysqldump <http://ur1.ca/7xo>
631 and to backup the Web directory, try tar.
636 The administrator can set the "private" flag for a site so that it's
637 not visible to non-logged-in users. This might be useful for
638 workgroups who want to share a microblogging site for project
639 management, but host it on a public server.
641 Note that this is an experimental feature; total privacy is not
642 guaranteed or ensured. Also, privacy is all-or-nothing for a site; you
643 can't have some accounts or notices private, and others public.
644 Finally, the interaction of private sites with OpenMicroBlogging is
645 undefined. Remote users won't be able to subscribe to users on a
646 private site, but users of the private site may be able to subscribe
647 to users on a remote site. (Or not... it's not well tested.) The
648 "proper behaviour" hasn't been defined here, so handle with care.
653 If you've been using Laconica 0.6, 0.5 or lower, or if you've been
654 tracking the "git" version of the software, you will probably want
655 to upgrade and keep your existing data. There is no automated upgrade
656 procedure in Laconica 0.7.0. Try these step-by-step instructions; read
657 to the end first before trying them.
659 0. Download Laconica and set up all the prerequisites as if you were
661 1. Make backups of both your database and your Web directory. UNDER NO
662 CIRCUMSTANCES should you try to do an upgrade without a known-good
663 backup. You have been warned.
664 2. Shut down Web access to your site, either by turning off your Web
665 server or by redirecting all pages to a "sorry, under maintenance"
667 3. Shut down XMPP access to your site, typically by shutting down the
668 xmppdaemon.php process and all other daemons that you're running.
669 If you've got "monit" or "cron" automatically restarting your
670 daemons, make sure to turn that off, too.
671 4. Shut down SMS and email access to your site. The easy way to do
672 this is to comment out the line piping incoming email to your
673 maildaemon.php file, and running something like "newaliases".
674 5. Once all writing processes to your site are turned off, make a
675 final backup of the Web directory and database.
676 6. Move your Laconica directory to a backup spot, like "mublog.bak".
677 7. Unpack your Laconica 0.6 tarball and move it to "mublog" or
678 wherever your code used to be.
679 8. Copy the config.php file and avatar directory from your old
680 directory to your new directory.
681 9. Copy htaccess.sample to .htaccess in the new directory. Change the
682 RewriteBase to use the correct path.
683 10. Rebuild the database. Go to your Laconica directory and run the
684 rebuilddb.sh script like this:
686 ./scripts/rebuilddb.sh rootuser rootpassword database db/laconica.sql
688 Here, rootuser and rootpassword are the username and password for a
689 user who can drop and create databases as well as tables; typically
690 that's _not_ the user Laconica runs as.
691 11. Use mysql client to log into your database and make sure that the
692 notice, user, profile, subscription etc. tables are non-empty.
693 12. Turn back on the Web server, and check that things still work.
694 13. Turn back on XMPP bots and email maildaemon. Note that the XMPP
695 bots have changed since version 0.5; see above for details.
697 If you're upgrading from very old versions, you may want to look at
698 the fixup_* scripts in the scripts directories. These will store some
699 precooked data in the DB. All upgraders should check out the inboxes
702 NOTE: the database definition file, stoica.ini, has been renamed to
703 laconica.ini (since this is the recommended database name). If you
704 have a line in your config.php pointing to the old name, you'll need
710 Before version 0.6.2, the page showing all notices from people the
711 user is subscribed to ("so-and-so with friends") was calculated at run
712 time. Starting with 0.6.2, we have a new data structure for holding a
713 user's "notice inbox". (Note: distinct from the "message inbox", which
714 is the "inbox" tab in the UI. The notice inbox appears under the
717 Notices are added to the inbox when they're created. This speeds up
718 the query considerably, and also allows us the opportunity, in the
719 future, to add different kind of notices to an inbox -- like @-replies
720 or subscriptions to search terms or hashtags.
722 Notice inboxes are enabled by default for new installations. If you
723 are upgrading an existing site, this means that your users will see
724 empty "Personal" pages. The following steps will help you fix the
727 0. $config['inboxes']['enabled'] can be set to one of three values. If
728 you set it to 'false', the site will work as before. Support for this
729 will probably be dropped in future versions.
730 1. Setting the flag to 'transitional' means that you're in transition.
731 In this mode, the code will run the "new query" or the "old query"
732 based on whether the user's inbox has been updated.
733 2. After setting the flag to "transitional", you can run the
734 fixup_inboxes.php script to create the inboxes. You may want to set
735 the memory limit high. You can re-run it without ill effect.
736 3. When fixup_inboxes is finished, you can set the enabled flag to
739 Configuration options
740 =====================
742 The sole configuration file for Laconica (excepting configurations for
743 dependency software) is config.php in your Laconica directory. If you
744 edit any other file in the directory, like lib/common.php (where most
745 of the defaults are defined), you will lose your configuration options
746 in any upgrade, and you will wish that you had been more careful.
748 Starting with version 0.7.1, you can put config files in the
749 /etc/laconica/ directory on your server, if it exists. Config files
750 will be included in this order:
752 * /etc/laconica/laconica.php - server-wide config
753 * /etc/laconica/<servername>.php - for a virtual host
754 * /etc/laconica/<servername>_<pathname>.php - for a path
755 * INSTALLDIR/config.php - for a particular implementation
757 Almost all configuration options are made through a two-dimensional
758 associative array, cleverly named $config. A typical configuration
761 $config['section']['option'] = value;
763 For brevity, the following documentation describes each section and
769 This section is a catch-all for site-wide variables.
771 name: the name of your site, like 'YourCompany Microblog'.
772 server: the server part of your site's URLs, like 'example.net'.
773 path: The path part of your site's URLs, like 'mublog' or '/'
775 fancy: whether or not your site uses fancy URLs (see Fancy URLs
776 section above). Default is false.
777 logfile: full path to a file for Laconica to save logging
778 information to. You may want to use this if you don't have
780 locale_path: full path to the directory for locale data. Unless you
781 store all your locale data in one place, you probably
782 don't need to use this.
783 language: default language for your site. Defaults to US English.
784 languages: A list of languages supported on your site. Typically you'd
785 only change this if you wanted to disable support for one
787 "unset($config['site']['languages']['de'])" will disable
789 theme: Theme for your site (see Theme section). Two themes are
790 provided by default: 'default' and 'stoica' (the one used by
791 Identi.ca). It's appreciated if you don't use the 'stoica' theme
792 except as the basis for your own.
793 email: contact email address for your site. By default, it's extracted
794 from your Web server environment; you may want to customize it.
795 broughtbyurl: name of an organization or individual who provides the
796 service. Each page will include a link to this name in the
797 footer. A good way to link to the blog, forum, wiki,
798 corporate portal, or whoever is making the service available.
799 broughtby: text used for the "brought by" link.
800 timezone: default timezone for message display. Users can set their
801 own time zone. Defaults to 'UTC', which is a pretty good default.
802 closed: If set to 'true', will disallow registration on your site.
803 This is a cheap way to restrict accounts to only one
804 individual or group; just register the accounts you want on
805 the service, *then* set this variable to 'true'.
806 inviteonly: If set to 'true', will only allow registration if the user
807 was invited by an existing user.
808 private: If set to 'true', anonymous users will be redirected to the
809 'login' page. Also, API methods that normally require no
810 authentication will require it. Note that this does not turn
811 off registration; use 'closed' or 'inviteonly' for the
813 notice: A plain string that will appear on every page. A good place
814 to put introductory information about your service, or info about
815 upgrades and outages, or other community info. Any HTML will
821 This section is a reference to the configuration options for
822 DB_DataObject (see <http://ur1.ca/7xp>). The ones that you may want to
823 set are listed below for clarity.
825 database: a DSN (Data Source Name) for your Laconica database. This is
826 in the format 'protocol://username:password@hostname/databasename',
827 where 'protocol' is 'mysql' or 'mysqli' (or possibly 'postgresql', if you
828 really know what you're doing), 'username' is the username,
829 'password' is the password, and etc.
830 ini_yourdbname: if your database is not named 'laconica', you'll need
831 to set this to point to the location of the
832 laconica.ini file. Note that the real name of your database
833 should go in there, not literally 'yourdbname'.
834 db_driver: You can try changing this to 'MDB2' to use the other driver
835 type for DB_DataObject, but note that it breaks the OpenID
836 libraries, which only support PEAR::DB.
837 debug: On a database error, you may get a message saying to set this
838 value to 5 to see debug messages in the browser. This breaks
839 just about all pages, and will also expose the username and
841 quote_identifiers: Set this to true if you're using postgresql.
842 type: either 'mysql' or 'postgresql' (used for some bits of
843 database-type-specific SQL in the code). Defaults to mysql.
844 mirror: you can set this to an array of DSNs, like the above
845 'database' value. If it's set, certain read-only actions will
846 use a random value out of this array for the database, rather
847 than the one in 'database' (actually, 'database' is overwritten).
848 You can offload a busy DB server by setting up MySQL replication
849 and adding the slaves to this array. Note that if you want some
850 requests to go to the 'database' (master) server, you'll need
851 to include it in this array, too.
856 By default, Laconica sites log error messages to the syslog facility.
857 (You can override this using the 'logfile' parameter described above).
859 appname: The name that Laconica uses to log messages. By default it's
860 "laconica", but if you have more than one installation on the
861 server, you may want to change the name for each instance so
862 you can track log messages more easily.
867 You can configure the software to queue time-consuming tasks, like
868 sending out SMS email or XMPP messages, for off-line processing. See
869 'Queues and daemons' above for how to set this up.
871 enabled: Whether to uses queues. Defaults to false.
876 The default license to use for your users notices. The default is the
877 Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which is probably the right
878 choice for any public site. Note that some other servers will not
879 accept notices if you apply a stricter license than this.
881 url: URL of the license, used for links.
882 title: Title for the license, like 'Creative Commons Attribution 3.0'.
883 image: A button shown on each page for the license.
888 This is for configuring out-going email. We use PEAR's Mail module,
889 see: http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.mail.mail.factory.php
891 backend: the backend to use for mail, one of 'mail', 'sendmail', and
892 'smtp'. Defaults to PEAR's default, 'mail'.
893 params: if the mail backend requires any parameters, you can provide
894 them in an associative array.
899 This is for configuring nicknames in the service.
901 blacklist: an array of strings for usernames that may not be
902 registered. A default array exists for strings that are
903 used by Laconica (e.g. 'doc', 'main', 'avatar', 'theme')
904 but you may want to add others if you have other software
905 installed in a subdirectory of Laconica or if you just
906 don't want certain words used as usernames.
907 featured: an array of nicknames of 'featured' users of the site.
908 Can be useful to draw attention to well-known users, or
909 interesting people, or whatever.
914 For configuring avatar access.
916 server: If set, defines another server where avatars are stored in the
917 root directory. Note that the 'avatar' subdir still has to be
918 writeable. You'd typically use this to split HTTP requests on
919 the client to speed up page loading, either with another
920 virtual server or with an NFS or SAMBA share. Clients
921 typically only make 2 connections to a single server at a
922 time <http://ur1.ca/6ih>, so this can parallelize the job.
928 For configuring the public stream.
930 localonly: If set to true, only messages posted by users of this
931 service (rather than other services, filtered through OMB)
932 are shown in the public stream. Default true.
933 blacklist: An array of IDs of users to hide from the public stream.
934 Useful if you have someone making excessive Twitterfeed posts
935 to the site, other kinds of automated posts, testing bots, etc.
940 server: Like avatars, you can speed up page loading by pointing the
941 theme file lookup to another server (virtual or real). The
942 theme server's root path should map to the Laconica "theme"
943 subdirectory. Defaults to NULL.
948 For configuring the XMPP sub-system.
950 enabled: Whether to accept and send messages by XMPP. Default false.
951 server: server part of XMPP ID for update user.
952 port: connection port for clients. Default 5222, which you probably
953 shouldn't need to change.
954 user: username for the client connection. Users will receive messages
955 from 'user'@'server'.
956 resource: a unique identifier for the connection to the server. This
957 is actually used as a prefix for each XMPP component in the system.
958 password: password for the user account.
959 host: some XMPP domains are served by machines with a different
960 hostname. (For example, @gmail.com GTalk users connect to
961 talk.google.com). Set this to the correct hostname if that's the
962 case with your server.
963 encryption: Whether to encrypt the connection between Laconica and the
964 XMPP server. Defaults to true, but you can get
965 considerably better performance turning it off if you're
966 connecting to a server on the same machine or on a
968 debug: if turned on, this will make the XMPP library blurt out all of
969 the incoming and outgoing messages as XML stanzas. Use as a
970 last resort, and never turn it on if you don't have queues
971 enabled, since it will spit out sensitive data to the browser.
972 public: an array of JIDs to send _all_ notices to. This is useful for
973 participating in third-party search and archiving services.
978 Miscellaneous tagging stuff.
980 dropoff: Decay factor for tag listing, in seconds.
981 Defaults to exponential decay over ten days; you can twiddle
982 with it to try and get better results for your site.
987 For daemon processes.
989 piddir: directory that daemon processes should write their PID file
990 (process ID) to. Defaults to /var/run/, which is where this
991 stuff should usually go on Unix-ish systems.
992 user: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective user ID
993 to this user before running. Probably a good idea, especially if
994 you start the daemons as root. Note: user name, like 'daemon',
996 group: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective group ID
997 to this named group. Again, a name, not a numerical ID.
1002 You can get a significant boost in performance by caching some
1003 database data in memcached <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>.
1005 enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
1006 server: a string with the hostname of the memcached server. Can also
1007 be an array of hostnames, if you've got more than one server.
1012 You can get a significant boost in performance using Sphinx Search
1013 instead of your database server to search for users and notices.
1014 <http://sphinxsearch.com/>.
1016 enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
1017 server: a string with the hostname of the sphinx server.
1018 port: an integer with the port number of the sphinx server.
1023 A catch-all for integration with other systems.
1025 source: The name to use for the source of posts to Twitter. Defaults
1026 to 'laconica', but if you request your own source name from
1027 Twitter <http://twitter.com/help/request_source>, you can use
1028 that here instead. Status updates on Twitter will then have
1036 enabled: A three-valued flag for whether to use notice inboxes (see
1037 upgrading info above for notes about this change). Can be
1038 'false', 'true', or '"transitional"'.
1043 For notice-posting throttles.
1045 enabled: Whether to throttle posting. Defaults to false.
1046 count: Each user can make this many posts in 'timespan' seconds. So, if count
1047 is 100 and timespan is 3600, then there can be only 100 posts
1048 from a user every hour.
1049 timespan: see 'count'.
1056 banned: an array of usernames and/or profile IDs of 'banned' profiles.
1057 The site will reject any notices by these users -- they will
1058 not be accepted at all. (Compare with blacklisted users above,
1059 whose posts just won't show up in the public stream.)
1064 The primary output for Laconica is syslog, unless you configured a
1065 separate logfile. This is probably the first place to look if you're
1066 getting weird behaviour from Laconica.
1068 If you're tracking the unstable version of Laconica in the git
1069 repository (see below), and you get a compilation error ("unexpected
1070 T_STRING") in the browser, check to see that you don't have any
1071 conflicts in your code.
1073 If you upgraded to Laconica 0.7.0 without reading the "Notice inboxes"
1074 section above, and all your users' 'Personal' tabs are empty, read the
1075 "Notice inboxes" section above.
1080 These are some myths you may see on the Web about Laconica.
1081 Documentation from the core team about Laconica has been pretty
1082 sparse, so some backtracking and guesswork resulted in some incorrect
1085 - "Set $config['db']['debug'] = 5 to debug the database." This is an
1086 extremely bad idea. It's a tool built into DB_DataObject that will
1087 emit oodles of print lines directly to the browser of your users.
1088 Among these lines will be your database username and password. Do
1089 not enable this option on a production Web site for any reason.
1091 - "Edit dataobject.ini with the following settings..." dataobject.ini
1092 is a development file for the DB_DataObject framework and is not
1093 used by the running software. It was removed from the Laconica
1094 distribution because its presence was confusing. Do not bother
1095 configuring dataobject.ini, and do not put your database username
1096 and password into the file on a production Web server; unscrupulous
1097 persons may try to read it to get your passwords.
1102 If you're adventurous or impatient, you may want to install the
1103 development version of Laconica. To get it, use the git version
1104 control tool <http://git-scm.com/> like so:
1106 git clone http://laconi.ca/software/laconica.git
1108 To keep it up-to-date, use 'git pull'. Watch for conflicts!
1113 There are several ways to get more information about Laconica.
1115 * There is a mailing list for Laconica developers and admins at
1116 http://mail.laconi.ca/mailman/listinfo/laconica-dev
1117 * The #laconica IRC channel on freenode.net <http://www.freenode.net/>.
1118 * The Laconica wiki, http://laconi.ca/trac/
1123 * Microblogging messages to http://identi.ca/evan are very welcome.
1124 * Laconica's Trac server has a bug tracker for any defects you may find,
1125 or ideas for making things better. http://laconi.ca/trac/
1126 * e-mail to evan@identi.ca will usually be read and responded to very
1127 quickly, unless the question is really hard.
1132 The following is an incomplete list of developers who've worked on
1133 Laconi.ca. Apologies for any oversight; please let evan@identi.ca know
1134 if anyone's been overlooked in error.
1136 * Evan Prodromou, founder and lead developer, Control Yourself, Inc.
1137 * Zach Copley, Control Yourself, Inc.
1138 * Earle Martin, Control Yourself, Inc.
1139 * Marie-Claude Doyon, designer, Control Yourself, Inc.
1140 * Sarven Capadisli, Control Yourself, Inc.
1141 * Robin Millette, Control Yourself, Inc.
1152 * Tryggvi Björgvinsson
1156 * Ken Sheppardson (Trac server, man-about-town)
1157 * Tiago 'gouki' Faria (i18n managerx)
1159 Thanks also to the developers of our upstream library code and to the
1160 thousands of people who have tried out Identi.ca, installed Laconi.ca,
1161 told their friends, and built the Open Microblogging network to what