5 Laconica 0.6.4 ("Catapult")
8 This is the README file for Laconica, the Open Source microblogging
9 platform. It includes installation instructions, descriptions of
10 options you can set, warnings, tips, and general info for
11 administrators. Information on using Laconica can be found in the
12 "doc" subdirectory or in the "help" section on-line.
17 Laconica (pronounced "luh-KAWN-ih-kuh") is a Free and Open Source
18 microblogging platform. It helps people in a community, company or
19 group to exchange short (140 character) messages over the Web. Users
20 can choose which people to "follow" and receive only their friends' or
21 colleagues' status messages. It provides a similar service to sites
22 like Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce and Plurk.
24 With a little work, status messages can be sent to mobile phones,
25 instant messenger programs (GTalk/Jabber), and specially-designed
26 desktop clients that support the Twitter API.
28 Laconica supports an open standard called OpenMicroBlogging
29 (http://openmicroblogging.org/) that lets users on different Web sites
30 or in different companies subscribe to each others' notices. It
31 enables a distributed social network spread all across the Web.
33 Laconica was originally developed for the Open Software Service,
34 Identi.ca (http://identi.ca/). It is shared with you in hope that you
35 too make an Open Software Service available to your users. To learn
36 more, please see the Open Software Service Definition 1.0:
38 http://www.openknowledge.org/ossd
43 This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
44 it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as
45 published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the
46 License, or (at your option) any later version.
48 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
49 WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
50 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
51 Affero General Public License for more details.
53 You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public
54 License along with this program, in the file "COPYING". If not, see
55 <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
57 IMPORTANT NOTE: The GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) has
58 *different requirements* from the "regular" GPL. In particular, if
59 you make modifications to the Laconica source code on your server,
60 you *MUST MAKE AVAILABLE* the modified version of the source code
61 to your users under the same license. This is a legal requirement
62 of using the software, and if you do not wish to share your
63 modifications, *YOU MAY NOT INSTALL LACONICA*.
65 Additional library software has been made available in the 'extlib'
66 directory. All of it is Free Software and can be distributed under
67 liberal terms, but those terms may differ in detail from the AGPL's
68 particulars. See each package's license file in the extlib directory
74 This is a minor feature and security improvement version from version
75 0.6.3 (release 24 Nov 2008). Notable features of version 0.6.4 include:
77 - "private" installs won't show any data to the outside world; redirect
78 non-logged-in users to login. (See "Private" below)
79 - Ability to "block" a subscriber, which forces them to unsubscribe,
80 doesn't allow them to subscribe again, and doesn't allow them to send
82 - Fine-grained control of subscriptions; users can choose not to receive
83 notices from other users over SMS, or IM, or both
84 - support for Mozilla microsummaries
85 (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Microsummaries)
86 - more efficient support for blacklisting users from the public page
87 - instructions on the public page for people who aren't logged in
88 - better registration instructions
89 - a check for license compatibility in receiving OMB notices
90 - HTML output in RSS 1.0, 2.0, and Atom feeds
91 - tuned and more reliable 'rememberme' cookies for username/password
93 - a utility for setting user passwords
94 - a "ban" configuration variable to ban certain users from posting
96 - an configurable posting throttle to keep any one user from flooding
97 the site with messages.
98 - fine-tuned url-shortening: only shorten if it's needed, only expand
99 certain URLs, and handle failure of URL-shortening services reliably
100 - disable Ajax input for notices, subscribe, nudge, while the
101 request is processing
102 - early implementation of support for Last-Modified and ETag-based
104 - initial microformats support
105 - redirect on bad nicknames in URLs
106 - correctly send emails in recipient's, not sender's, language
107 - correct email content type
108 - Change "Most Favorited" page to "Popular"
109 - properly support the "since" parameter in API calls
110 - Fix for changes in validate_credentials API call for the Twitter
112 - Fix for fatal error when sending email confirmation on registration
113 - Better replies for commands sent through the Ajax channel
114 - Add a User-Agent string for OMB requests
115 - Upgrade upstream library XMPPHP
116 - Upgrade upstream library JQuery Forms
117 - Code cleanup: checkboxes have proper <label> elements
118 - Code cleanup: consolidated various notice-listing code in one place
119 - Better support for unsubscribing from a remote user
124 The following software packages are *required* for this software to
127 - PHP 5.2.x. It may be possible to run this software on earlier
128 versions of PHP, but many of the functions used are only available
130 - MySQL 5.x. The Laconica database is stored, by default, in a MySQL
131 server. It has been primarily tested on 5.x servers, although it may
132 be possible to install on earlier (or later!) versions. The server
133 *must* support the MyISAM storage engine -- the default for most
134 MySQL servers -- *and* the InnoDB storage engine.
135 - A Web server. Preferably, you should have Apache 2.2.x with the
136 mod_rewrite extension installed and enabled.
138 Your PHP installation must include the following PHP extensions:
140 - Curl. This is for fetching files by HTTP.
141 - XMLWriter. This is for formatting XML and HTML output.
142 - MySQL. For accessing the database.
143 - GD. For scaling down avatar images.
144 - mbstring. For handling Unicode (UTF-8) encoded strings.
145 - gettext. For multiple languages. Default on many PHP installs.
147 For some functionality, you will also need the following extensions:
149 - Memcache. A client for the memcached server, which caches database
150 information in volatile memory. This is important for adequate
151 performance on high-traffic sites. You will also need a memcached
152 server to store the data in.
153 - Mailparse. Efficient parsing of email requires this extension.
154 Submission by email or SMS-over-email uses this extension.
155 - Sphinx Search. A client for the sphinx server, an alternative
156 to MySQL or Postgresql fulltext search. You will also need a
157 Sphinx server to serve the search queries.
159 You will almost definitely get 2-3 times better performance from your
160 site if you install a PHP bytecode cache/accelerator. Some well-known
161 examples are: eaccelerator, Turck mmcache, xcache, apc. Zend Optimizer
162 is a proprietary accelerator installed on some hosting sites.
167 A number of external PHP libraries are used to provide basic
168 functionality and optional functionality for your system. For your
169 convenience, they are available in the "extlib" directory of this
170 package, and you do not have to download and install them. However,
171 you may want to keep them up-to-date with the latest upstream version,
172 and the URLs are listed here for your convenience.
174 - DB_DataObject http://pear.php.net/package/DB_DataObject
175 - Validate http://pear.php.net/package/Validate
176 - OpenID from OpenIDEnabled (not the PEAR version!). We decided
177 to use the openidenabled.com version since it's more widely
178 implemented, and seems to be better supported.
179 http://openidenabled.com/php-openid/
180 - PEAR DB. Although this is an older data access system (new
181 packages should probably use PHP DBO), the OpenID libraries
182 depend on PEAR DB so we use it here, too. DB_DataObject can
183 also use PEAR MDB2, which may give you better performance
184 but won't work with OpenID.
185 http://pear.php.net/package/DB
186 - OAuth.php from http://oauth.googlecode.com/svn/code/php/
187 - markdown.php from http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/
188 - PEAR Mail, for sending out mail notifications
189 http://pear.php.net/package/Mail
190 - PEAR Net_SMTP, if you use the SMTP factory for notifications
191 http://pear.php.net/package/Net_SMTP
192 - PEAR Net_Socket, if you use the SMTP factory for notifications
193 http://pear.php.net/package/Net_Socket
194 - XMPPHP, the follow-up to Class.Jabber.php. Probably the best XMPP
195 library available for PHP. http://xmpphp.googlecode.com/. Note that
196 as of this writing the version of this library that is available in
197 the extlib directory is *significantly different* from the upstream
198 version (patches have been submitted). Upgrading to the upstream
199 version may render your Laconica site unable to send or receive XMPP
202 A design goal of Laconica is that the basic Web functionality should
203 work on even the most restrictive commercial hosting services.
204 However, additional functionality, such as receiving messages by
205 Jabber/GTalk, require that you be able to run long-running processes
206 on your account. In addition, posting by email or from SMS require
207 that you be able to install a mail filter in your mail server.
212 Installing the basic Laconica Web component is relatively easy,
213 especially if you've previously installed PHP/MySQL packages.
215 1. Unpack the tarball you downloaded on your Web server. Usually a
216 command like this will work:
218 tar zxf laconica-0.6.4.tar.gz
220 ...which will make a laconica-0.6.4 subdirectory in your current
221 directory. (If you don't have shell access on your Web server, you
222 may have to unpack the tarball on your local computer and FTP the
223 files to the server.)
225 2. Move the tarball to a directory of your choosing in your Web root
226 directory. Usually something like this will work:
228 mv laconica-0.6.4 /var/www/mublog
230 This will make your Laconica instance available in the mublog path of
231 your server, like "http://example.net/mublog". "microblog" or
232 "laconica" might also be good path names. If you know how to
233 configure virtual hosts on your web server, you can try setting up
234 "http://micro.example.net/" or the like.
236 3. You should also take this moment to make your avatar subdirectory
237 writeable by the Web server. An insecure way to do this is:
239 chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/avatar
241 On some systems, this will probably work:
243 chgrp www-data /var/www/mublog/avatar
244 chmod g+w /var/www/mublog/avatar
246 If your Web server runs as another user besides "www-data", try
247 that user's default group instead. As a last resort, you can create
248 a new group like "avatar" and add the Web server's user to the group.
250 4. Create a database to hold your microblog data. Something like this
253 mysqladmin -u "username" --password="password" create laconica
255 Note that Laconica must have its own database; you can't share the
256 database with another program. You can name it whatever you want,
259 (If you don't have shell access to your server, you may need to use
260 a tool like PHPAdmin to create a database. Check your hosting
261 service's documentation for how to create a new MySQL database.)
263 5. Run the laconica.sql SQL script in the db subdirectory to create
264 the database tables in the database. A typical system would work
267 mysql -u "username" --password="password" laconica < /var/www/mublog/db/laconica.sql
269 You may want to test by logging into the database and checking that
270 the tables were created. Here's an example:
274 6. Create a new database account that Laconica will use to access the
275 database. If you have shell access, this will probably work from the
278 GRANT SELECT,INSERT,DELETE,UPDATE on laconica.*
279 TO 'lacuser'@'localhost'
280 IDENTIFIED BY 'lacpassword';
282 You should change 'lacuser' and 'lacpassword' to your preferred new
283 username and password. You may want to test logging in as this new
284 user and testing that you can SELECT from some of the tables in the
285 DB (use SHOW TABLES to see which ones are there).
287 7. Copy the config.php.sample in the Laconica directory to config.php.
289 8. Edit config.php to set the basic configuration for your system.
290 (See descriptions below for basic config options.) Note that there
291 are lots of options and if you try to do them all at once, you will
292 have a hard time making sure what's working and what's not. So,
293 stick with the basics at first. In particular, customizing the
294 'site' and 'db' settings will almost definitely be needed.
296 9. At this point, you should be able to navigate in a browser to your
297 microblog's main directory and see the "Public Timeline", which
298 will be empty. If not, magic has happened! You can now register a
299 new user, post some notices, edit your profile, etc. However, you
300 may want to wait to do that stuff if you think you can set up
301 "fancy URLs" (see below), since some URLs are stored in the database.
306 By default, Laconica will have big long sloppy URLs that are hard for
307 people to remember or use. For example, a user's home profile might be
310 http://example.org/mublog/index.php?action=showstream&nickname=fred
312 It's possible to configure the software so it looks like this instead:
314 http://example.org/mublog/fred
316 These "fancy URLs" are more readable and memorable for users. To use
317 fancy URLs, you must either have Apache 2.2.x with .htaccess enabled
318 and mod_redirect enabled, -OR- know how to configure "url redirection"
321 1. Copy the htaccess.sample file to .htaccess in your Laconica
322 directory. Note: if you have control of your server's httpd.conf or
323 similar configuration files, it can greatly improve performance to
324 import the .htaccess file into your conf file instead. If you're
325 not sure how to do it, you may save yourself a lot of headache by
326 just leaving the .htaccess file.
328 2. Change the "RewriteBase" in the new .htaccess file to be the URL path
329 to your Laconica installation on your server. Typically this will
330 be the path to your Laconica directory relative to your Web root.
332 3. Add or uncomment or change a line in your config.php file so it says:
334 $config['site']['fancy'] = true;
336 You should now be able to navigate to a "fancy" URL on your server,
339 http://example.net/mublog/main/register
341 If you changed your HTTP server configuration, you may need to restart
344 If you have problems with the .htaccess file on versions of Apache
345 earlier than 2.2.x, try changing the regular expressions in the
346 htaccess.sample file that use "\w" to just use ".".
351 To use a Sphinx server to search users and notices, you also need
352 to install, compile and enable the sphinx pecl extension for php on the
353 client side, which itself depends on the sphinx development files.
354 "pecl install sphinx" should take care of that. Add "extension=sphinx.so"
355 to your php.ini and reload apache to enable it.
357 You can update your MySQL or Postgresql databases to drop their fulltext
358 search indexes, since they're now provided by sphinx.
360 On the sphinx server side, a script reads the main database and build
361 the keyword index. A cron job reads the database and keeps the sphinx
362 indexes up to date. scripts/sphinx-cron.sh should be called by cron
363 every 5 minutes, for example. scripts/sphinx.sh is an init.d script
364 to start and stop the sphinx search daemon.
369 Laconica supports a cheap-and-dirty system for sending update messages
370 to mobile phones and for receiving updates from the mobile. Instead of
371 sending through the SMS network itself, which is costly and requires
372 buy-in from the wireless carriers, it simply piggybacks on the email
373 gateways that many carriers provide to their customers. So, SMS
374 configuration is essentially email configuration.
376 Each user sends to a made-up email address, which they keep a secret.
377 Incoming email that is "From" the user's SMS email address, and "To"
378 the users' secret email address on the site's domain, will be
379 converted to a message and stored in the DB.
381 For this to work, there *must* be a domain or sub-domain for which all
382 (or most) incoming email can pass through the incoming mail filter.
384 1. Run the SQL script carrier.sql in your Laconica database. This will
387 mysql -u "lacuser" --password="lacpassword" laconica < db/carrier.sql
389 This will populate your database with a list of wireless carriers
390 that support email SMS gateways.
392 2. Make sure the maildaemon.php file is executable:
394 chmod +x scripts/maildaemon.php
396 Note that "daemon" is kind of a misnomer here; the script is more
397 of a filter than a daemon.
399 2. Edit /etc/aliases on your mail server and add the following line:
401 *: /path/to/laconica/scripts/maildaemon.php
403 3. Run whatever code you need to to update your aliases database. For
404 many mail servers (Postfix, Exim, Sendmail), this should work:
408 You may need to restart your mail server for the new database to
411 4. Set the following in your config.php file:
413 $config['mail']['domain'] = 'yourdomain.example.net';
415 At this point, post-by-email and post-by-SMS-gateway should work. Note
416 that if your mail server is on a different computer from your email
417 server, you'll need to have a full installation of Laconica, a working
418 config.php, and access to the Laconica database from the mail server.
423 XMPP (eXtended Message and Presence Protocol, http://xmpp.org/) is the
424 instant-messenger protocol that drives Jabber and GTalk IM. You can
425 distribute messages via XMPP using the system below; however, you
426 need to run the XMPP incoming daemon to allow incoming messages as
429 1. You may want to strongly consider setting up your own XMPP server.
430 Ejabberd, OpenFire, and JabberD are all Open Source servers.
431 Jabber, Inc. provides a high-performance commercial server.
433 2. You must register a Jabber ID (JID) with your new server. It helps
434 to choose a name like "update@example.com" or "notice" or something
435 similar. Alternately, your "update JID" can be registered on a
436 publicly-available XMPP service, like jabber.org or GTalk.
438 Laconica will not register the JID with your chosen XMPP server;
439 you need to do this manually, with an XMPP client like Gajim,
440 Telepathy, or Pidgin.im.
442 3. Configure your site's XMPP variables, as described below in the
443 configuration section.
445 On a default installation, your site can broadcast messages using
446 XMPP. Users won't be able to post messages using XMPP unless you've
447 got the XMPP daemon running. See 'Queues and daemons' below for how
448 to set that up. Also, once you have a sizable number of users, sending
449 a lot of SMS, OMB, and XMPP messages whenever someone posts a message
450 can really slow down your site; it may cause posting to timeout.
452 NOTE: stream_select(), a crucial function for network programming, is
453 broken on PHP 5.2.x less than 5.2.6 on amd64-based servers. We don't
454 work around this bug in Laconica; current recommendation is to move
455 off of amd64 to another server.
460 You can send *all* messages from your microblogging site to a
461 third-party service using XMPP. This can be useful for providing
462 search, indexing, bridging, or other cool services.
464 To configure a downstream site to receive your public stream, add
465 their "JID" (Jabber ID) to your config.php as follows:
467 $config['xmpp']['public'][] = 'downstream@example.net';
469 (Don't miss those square brackets at the end.) Note that your XMPP
470 broadcasting must be configured as mentioned above. Although you can
471 send out messages at "Web time", high-volume sites should strongly
472 consider setting up queues and daemons.
477 Some activities that Laconica needs to do, like broadcast OMB, SMS,
478 and XMPP messages, can be 'queued' and done by off-line bots instead.
479 For this to work, you must be able to run long-running offline
480 processes, either on your main Web server or on another server you
481 control. (Your other server will still need all the above
482 prerequisites, with the exception of Apache.) Installing on a separate
483 server is probably a good idea for high-volume sites.
485 1. You'll need the "CLI" (command-line interface) version of PHP
486 installed on whatever server you use.
488 2. If you're using a separate server for queues, install Laconica
489 somewhere on the server. You don't need to worry about the
490 .htaccess file, but make sure that your config.php file is close
491 to, or identical to, your Web server's version.
493 3. In your config.php files (both the Web server and the queues
494 server!), set the following variable:
496 $config['queue']['enabled'] = true;
498 You may also want to look at the 'daemon' section of this file for
499 more daemon options. Note that if you set the 'user' and/or 'group'
500 options, you'll need to create that user and/or group by hand.
501 They're not created automatically.
503 4. On the queues server, run the command scripts/startdaemons.sh. It
504 needs as a parameter the install path; if you run it from the
505 Laconica dir, "." should suffice.
507 This will run six (for now) queue handlers:
509 * xmppdaemon.php - listens for new XMPP messages from users and stores
510 them as notices in the database.
511 * jabberqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
512 registered users who should receive them.
513 * publicqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
514 public feed listeners.
515 * ombqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to OpenMicroBlogging
516 recipients on foreign servers.
517 * smsqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to SMS-over-email addresses
519 * xmppconfirmhandler.php - sends confirmation messages to registered
522 Note that these queue daemons are pretty raw, and need your care. In
523 particular, they leak memory, and you may want to restart them on a
524 regular (daily or so) basis with a cron job. Also, if they lose
525 the connection to the XMPP server for too long, they'll simply die. It
526 may be a good idea to use a daemon-monitoring service, like 'monit',
527 to check their status and keep them running.
529 All the daemons write their process IDs (pids) to /var/run/ by
530 default. This can be useful for starting, stopping, and monitoring the
533 Twitter Friends Syncing
534 -----------------------
536 As of Laconica 0.6.3, users may set a flag in their settings ("Subscribe
537 to my Twitter friends here" under the Twitter tab) to have Laconica
538 attempt to locate and subscribe to "friends" (people they "follow") on
539 Twitter who also have accounts on your Laconica system, and who have
540 previously set up a link for automatically posting notices to Twitter.
542 Optionally, there is a script (./scripts/synctwitterfriends.php), meant
543 to be run periodically from a job scheduler (e.g.: cron under Unix), to
544 look for new additions to users' friends lists. Note that the friends
545 syncing only subscribes users to each other, it does not unsubscribe
546 users when they stop following each other on Twitter.
550 # Update Twitter friends subscriptions every half hour
551 0,30 * * * * /path/to/php /path/to/laconica/scripts/synctwitterfriends.php>&/dev/null
556 Sitemap files (http://sitemaps.org/) are a very nice way of telling
557 search engines and other interested bots what's available on your site
558 and what's changed recently. You can generate sitemap files for your
561 1. Choose your sitemap URL layout. Laconica creates a number of
562 sitemap XML files for different parts of your site. You may want to
563 put these in a sub-directory of your Laconica directory to avoid
564 clutter. The sitemap index file tells the search engines and other
565 bots where to find all the sitemap files; it *must* be in the main
566 installation directory or higher. Both types of file must be
567 available through HTTP.
569 2. To generate your sitemaps, run the following command on your server:
571 php scripts/sitemap.php -f index-file-path -d sitemap-directory -u URL-prefix-for-sitemaps
573 Here, index-file-path is the full path to the sitemap index file,
574 like './sitemapindex.xml'. sitemap-directory is the directory where
575 you want the sitemaps stored, like './sitemaps/' (make sure the dir
576 exists). URL-prefix-for-sitemaps is the full URL for the sitemap dir,
577 typically something like 'http://example.net/mublog/sitemaps/'.
579 You can use several methods for submitting your sitemap index to
580 search engines to get your site indexed. One is to add a line like the
581 following to your robots.txt file:
583 Sitemap: /mublog/sitemapindex.xml
585 This is a good idea for letting *all* Web spiders know about your
586 sitemap. You can also submit sitemap files to major search engines
587 using their respective "Webmaster centres"; see sitemaps.org for links
593 There are two themes shipped with this version of Laconica: "stoica",
594 which is what the Identi.ca site uses, and "default", which is a good
595 basis for other sites.
597 As of right now, your ability to change the theme is site-wide; users
598 can't choose their own theme. Additionally, the only thing you can
599 change in the theme is CSS stylesheets and some image files; you can't
600 change the HTML output, like adding or removing menu items.
602 You can choose a theme using the $config['site']['theme'] element in
603 the config.php file. See below for details.
605 You can add your own theme by making a sub-directory of the 'theme'
606 subdirectory with the name of your theme. Each theme can have the
609 display.css: a CSS2 file for "default" styling for all browsers.
610 ie6.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
612 ie7.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
614 logo.png: a logo image for the site.
615 default-avatar-profile.png: a 96x96 pixel image to use as the avatar for
616 users who don't upload their own.
617 default-avatar-stream.png: Ditto, but 48x48. For streams of notices.
618 default-avatar-mini.png: Ditto ditto, but 24x24. For subscriptions
619 listing on profile pages.
621 You may want to start by copying the files from the default theme to
627 Translations in Laconica use the gettext system (http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/).
628 Theoretically, you can add your own sub-directory to the locale/
629 subdirectory to add a new language to your system. You'll need to
630 compile the ".po" files into ".mo" files, however.
632 Contributions of translation information to Laconica are very easy:
633 you can use the Web interface at http://laconi.ca/entrans/ to add one
634 or a few or lots of new translations -- or even new languages. You can
635 also download more up-to-date .po files there, if you so desire.
640 There is no built-in system for doing backups in Laconica. You can make
641 backups of a working Laconica system by backing up the database and
642 the Web directory. To backup the database use mysqldump (http://ur1.ca/7xo)
643 and to backup the Web directory, try tar.
648 The administrator can set the "private" flag for a site so that it's
649 not visible to non-logged-in users. This might be useful for
650 workgroups who want to share a microblogging site for project
651 management, but host it on a public server.
653 Note that this is an experimental feature; total privacy is not
654 guaranteed or ensured. Also, privacy is all-or-nothing for a site; you
655 can't have some accounts or notices private, and others public.
656 Finally, the interaction of private sites with OpenMicroBlogging is
657 undefined. Remote users won't be able to subscribe to users on a
658 private site, but users of the private site may be able to subscribe
659 to users on a remote site. (Or not... it's not well tested.) The
660 "proper behaviour" hasn't been defined here, so handle with care.
665 If you've been using Laconica 0.6, 0.5 or lower, or if you've been
666 tracking the "darcs" version of the software, you will probably want
667 to upgrade and keep your existing data. There is no automated upgrade
668 procedure in Laconica 0.6.4. Try these step-by-step instructions; read
669 to the end first before trying them.
671 0. Download Laconica and set up all the prerequisites as if you were
673 1. Make backups of both your database and your Web directory. UNDER NO
674 CIRCUMSTANCES should you try to do an upgrade without a known-good
675 backup. You have been warned.
676 2. Shut down Web access to your site, either by turning off your Web
677 server or by redirecting all pages to a "sorry, under maintenance"
679 3. Shut down XMPP access to your site, typically by shutting down the
680 xmppdaemon.php process and all other daemons that you're running.
681 If you've got "monit" or "cron" automatically restarting your
682 daemons, make sure to turn that off, too.
683 4. Shut down SMS and email access to your site. The easy way to do
684 this is to comment out the line piping incoming email to your
685 maildaemon.php file, and running something like "newaliases".
686 5. Once all writing processes to your site are turned off, make a
687 final backup of the Web directory and database.
688 6. Move your Laconica directory to a backup spot, like "mublog.bak".
689 7. Unpack your Laconica 0.6 tarball and move it to "mublog" or
690 wherever your code used to be.
691 8. Copy the config.php file and avatar directory from your old
692 directory to your new directory.
693 9. Copy htaccess.sample to .htaccess in the new directory. Change the
694 RewriteBase to use the correct path.
695 10. Rebuild the database. Go to your Laconica directory and run the
696 rebuilddb.sh script like this:
698 ./scripts/rebuilddb.sh rootuser rootpassword database db/laconica.sql
700 Here, rootuser and rootpassword are the username and password for a
701 user who can drop and create databases as well as tables; typically
702 that's _not_ the user Laconica runs as.
703 11. Use mysql client to log into your database and make sure that the
704 notice, user, profile, subscription etc. tables are non-empty.
705 12. Turn back on the Web server, and check that things still work.
706 13. Turn back on XMPP bots and email maildaemon. Note that the XMPP
707 bots have changed since version 0.5; see above for details.
709 If you're upgrading from very old versions, you may want to look at
710 the fixup_* scripts in the scripts directories. These will store some
711 precooked data in the DB. All upgraders should check out the inboxes
714 NOTE: the database definition file, stoica.ini, has been renamed to
715 laconica.ini (since this is the recommended database name). If you
716 have a line in your config.php pointing to the old name, you'll need
722 Before version 0.6.2, the page showing all notices from people the
723 user is subscribed to ("so-and-so with friends") was calculated at run
724 time. Starting with 0.6.2, we have a new data structure for holding a
725 user's "notice inbox". (Note: distinct from the "message inbox", which
726 is the "inbox" tab in the UI. The notice inbox appears under the
729 Notices are added to the inbox when they're created. This speeds up
730 the query considerably, and also allows us the opportunity, in the
731 future, to add different kind of notices to an inbox -- like @-replies
732 or subscriptions to search terms or hashtags.
734 Notice inboxes are enabled by default for new installations. If you
735 are upgrading an existing site, this means that your users will see
736 empty "Personal" pages. The following steps will help you fix the
739 0. $config['inboxes']['enabled'] can be set to one of three values. If
740 you set it to 'false', the site will work as before. Support for this
741 will probably be dropped in future versions.
742 1. Setting the flag to 'transitional' means that you're in transition.
743 In this mode, the code will run the "new query" or the "old query"
744 based on whether the user's inbox has been updated.
745 2. After setting the flag to "transitional", you can run the
746 fixup_inboxes.php script to create the inboxes. You may want to set
747 the memory limit high. You can re-run it without ill effect.
748 3. When fixup_inboxes is finished, you can set the enabled flag to
751 Configuration options
752 =====================
754 The sole configuration file for Laconica (excepting configurations for
755 dependency software) is config.php in your Laconica directory. If you
756 edit any other file in the directory, like lib/common.php (where most
757 of the defaults are defined), you will lose your configuration options
758 in any upgrade, and you will wish that you had been more careful.
760 Almost all configuration options are made through a two-dimensional
761 associative array, cleverly named $config. A typical configuration
764 $config['section']['option'] = value;
766 For brevity, the following documentation describes each section and
772 This section is a catch-all for site-wide variables.
774 name: the name of your site, like 'YourCompany Microblog'.
775 server: the server part of your site's URLs, like 'example.net'.
776 path: The path part of your site's URLs, like 'mublog' or '/'
778 fancy: whether or not your site uses fancy URLs (see Fancy URLs
779 section above). Default is false.
780 logfile: full path to a file for Laconica to save logging
781 information to. You may want to use this if you don't have
783 locale_path: full path to the directory for locale data. Unless you
784 store all your locale data in one place, you probably
785 don't need to use this.
786 language: default language for your site. Defaults to US English.
787 languages: A list of languages supported on your site. Typically you'd
788 only change this if you wanted to disable support for one
790 "unset($config['site']['languages']['de'])" will disable
792 theme: Theme for your site (see Theme section). Two themes are
793 provided by default: 'default' and 'stoica' (the one used by
794 Identi.ca). It's appreciated if you don't use the 'stoica' theme
795 except as the basis for your own.
796 email: contact email address for your site. By default, it's extracted
797 from your Web server environment; you may want to customize it.
798 broughtbyurl: name of an organization or individual who provides the
799 service. Each page will include a link to this name in the
800 footer. A good way to link to the blog, forum, wiki,
801 corporate portal, or whoever is making the service available.
802 broughtby: text used for the "brought by" link.
803 timezone: default timezone for message display. Users can set their
804 own time zone. Defaults to 'UTC', which is a pretty good default.
805 closed: If set to 'true', will disallow registration on your site.
806 This is a cheap way to restrict accounts to only one
807 individual or group; just register the accounts you want on
808 the service, *then* set this variable to 'true'.
809 inviteonly: If set to 'true', will only allow registration if the user
810 was invited by an existing user.
811 private: If set to 'true', anonymous users will be redirected to the
812 'login' page. Also, API methods that normally require no
813 authentication will require it. Note that this does not turn
814 off registration; use 'closed' or 'inviteonly' for the
820 This section is a reference to the configuration options for
821 DB_DataObject (see http://ur1.ca/7xp). The ones that you may want to
822 set are listed below for clarity.
824 database: a DSN (Data Source Name) for your Laconica database. This is
825 in the format 'protocol://username:password@hostname/databasename',
826 where 'protocol' is 'mysql' or 'mysqli' (or possibly 'postgresql', if you
827 really know what you're doing), 'username' is the username,
828 'password' is the password, and etc.
829 ini_yourdbname: if your database is not named 'laconica', you'll need
830 to set this to point to the location of the
831 laconica.ini file. Note that the real name of your database
832 should go in there, not literally 'yourdbname'.
833 db_driver: You can try changing this to 'MDB2' to use the other driver
834 type for DB_DataObject, but note that it breaks the OpenID
835 libraries, which only support PEAR::DB.
836 debug: On a database error, you may get a message saying to set this
837 value to 5 to see debug messages in the browser. This breaks
838 just about all pages, and will also expose the username and
840 quote_identifiers: Set this to true if you're using postgresql.
841 type: either 'mysql' or 'postgresql' (used for some bits of
842 database-type-specific SQL in the code). Defaults to mysql.
843 mirror: you can set this to an array of DSNs, like the above
844 'database' value. If it's set, certain read-only actions will
845 use a random value out of this array for the database, rather
846 than the one in 'database' (actually, 'database' is overwritten).
847 You can offload a busy DB server by setting up MySQL replication
848 and adding the slaves to this array. Note that if you want some
849 requests to go to the 'database' (master) server, you'll need
850 to include it in this array, too.
855 By default, Laconica sites log error messages to the syslog facility.
856 (You can override this using the 'logfile' parameter described above).
858 appname: The name that Laconica uses to log messages. By default it's
859 "laconica", but if you have more than one installation on the
860 server, you may want to change the name for each instance so
861 you can track log messages more easily.
866 You can configure the software to queue time-consuming tasks, like
867 sending out SMS email or XMPP messages, for off-line processing. See
868 'Queues and daemons' above for how to set this up.
870 enabled: Whether to uses queues. Defaults to false.
875 The default license to use for your users notices. The default is the
876 Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which is probably the right
877 choice for any public site. Note that some other servers will not
878 accept notices if you apply a stricter license than this.
880 url: URL of the license, used for links.
881 title: Title for the license, like 'Creative Commons Attribution 3.0'.
882 image: A button shown on each page for the license.
887 This is for configuring out-going email. We use PEAR's Mail module,
888 see: http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.mail.mail.factory.php
890 backend: the backend to use for mail, one of 'mail', 'sendmail', and
891 'smtp'. Defaults to PEAR's default, 'mail'.
892 params: if the mail backend requires any parameters, you can provide
893 them in an associative array.
898 This is for configuring nicknames in the service.
900 blacklist: an array of strings for usernames that may not be
901 registered. A default array exists for strings that are
902 used by Laconica (e.g. 'doc', 'main', 'avatar', 'theme')
903 but you may want to add others if you have other software
904 installed in a subdirectory of Laconica or if you just
905 don't want certain words used as usernames.
906 featured: an array of nicknames of 'featured' users of the site.
907 Can be useful to draw attention to well-known users, or
908 interesting people, or whatever.
913 For configuring avatar access.
915 server: If set, defines another server where avatars are stored in the
916 root directory. Note that the 'avatar' subdir still has to be
917 writeable. You'd typically use this to split HTTP requests on
918 the client to speed up page loading, either with another
919 virtual server or with an NFS or SAMBA share. Clients
920 typically only make 2 connections to a single server at a
921 time (http://ur1.ca/6ih), so this can parallelize the job.
927 For configuring the public stream.
929 localonly: If set to true, only messages posted by users of this
930 service (rather than other services, filtered through OMB)
931 are shown in the public stream. Default true.
932 blacklist: An array of IDs of users to hide from the public stream.
933 Useful if you have someone making excessive Twitterfeed posts
934 to the site, other kinds of automated posts, testing bots, etc.
939 server: Like avatars, you can speed up page loading by pointing the
940 theme file lookup to another server (virtual or real). The
941 theme server's root path should map to the Laconica "theme"
942 subdirectory. Defaults to NULL.
947 For configuring the XMPP sub-system.
949 enabled: Whether to accept and send messages by XMPP. Default false.
950 server: server part of XMPP ID for update user.
951 port: connection port for clients. Default 5222, which you probably
952 shouldn't need to change.
953 user: username for the client connection. Users will receive messages
954 from 'user'@'server'.
955 resource: a unique identifier for the connection to the server. This
956 is actually used as a prefix for each XMPP component in the system.
957 password: password for the user account.
958 host: some XMPP domains are served by machines with a different
959 hostname. (For example, @gmail.com GTalk users connect to
960 talk.google.com). Set this to the correct hostname if that's the
961 case with your server.
962 encryption: Whether to encrypt the connection between Laconica and the
963 XMPP server. Defaults to true, but you can get
964 considerably better performance turning it off if you're
965 connecting to a server on the same machine or on a
967 debug: if turned on, this will make the XMPP library blurt out all of
968 the incoming and outgoing messages as XML stanzas. Use as a
969 last resort, and never turn it on if you don't have queues
970 enabled, since it will spit out sensitive data to the browser.
971 public: an array of JIDs to send _all_ notices to. This is useful for
972 participating in third-party search and archiving services.
977 Miscellaneous tagging stuff.
979 dropoff: Decay factor for tag listing, in seconds.
980 Defaults to exponential decay over ten days; you can twiddle
981 with it to try and get better results for your site.
986 For daemon processes.
988 piddir: directory that daemon processes should write their PID file
989 (process ID) to. Defaults to /var/run/, which is where this
990 stuff should usually go on Unix-ish systems.
991 user: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective user ID
992 to this user before running. Probably a good idea, especially if
993 you start the daemons as root. Note: user name, like 'daemon',
995 group: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective group ID
996 to this named group. Again, a name, not a numerical ID.
1001 You can get a significant boost in performance by caching some
1002 database data in memcached (http://www.danga.com/memcached/).
1004 enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
1005 server: a string with the hostname of the memcached server. Can also
1006 be an array of hostnames, if you've got more than one server.
1011 You can get a significant boost in performance using Sphinx Search
1012 instead of your database server to search for users and notices.
1013 (http://sphinxsearch.com/).
1015 enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
1016 server: a string with the hostname of the sphinx server.
1017 port: an integer with the port number of the sphinx server.
1022 A catch-all for integration with other systems.
1024 source: The name to use for the source of posts to Twitter. Defaults
1025 to 'laconica', but if you request your own source name from
1026 Twitter (http://twitter.com/help/request_source), you can use
1027 that here instead. Status updates on Twitter will then have
1035 enabled: A three-valued flag for whether to use notice inboxes (see
1036 upgrading info above for notes about this change). Can be
1037 'false', 'true', or '"transitional"'.
1042 For notice-posting throttles.
1044 enabled: Whether to throttle posting. Defaults to false.
1045 count: Each user can make this many posts in 'timespan' seconds. So, if count
1046 is 100 and timespan is 3600, then there can be only 100 posts
1047 from a user every hour.
1048 timespan: see 'count'.
1055 banned: an array of usernames and/or profile IDs of 'banned' profiles.
1056 The site will reject any notices by these users -- they will
1057 not be accepted at all. (Compare with blacklisted users above,
1058 whose posts just won't show up in the public stream.)
1063 The primary output for Laconica is syslog, unless you configured a
1064 separate logfile. This is probably the first place to look if you're
1065 getting weird behaviour from Laconica.
1067 If you're tracking the unstable version of Laconica in the darcs
1068 repository (see below), and you get a compilation error ("unexpected
1069 T_STRING") in the browser, check to see that you don't have any
1070 conflicts in your code.
1072 If you upgraded to Laconica 0.6.4 without reading the "Notice inboxes"
1073 section above, and all your users' 'Personal' tabs are empty, read the
1074 "Notice inboxes" section above.
1079 These are some myths you may see on the Web about Laconica.
1080 Documentation from the core team about Laconica has been pretty
1081 sparse, so some backtracking and guesswork resulted in some incorrect
1084 - "Set $config['db']['debug'] = 5 to debug the database." This is an
1085 extremely bad idea. It's a tool built into DB_DataObject that will
1086 emit oodles of print lines directly to the browser of your users.
1087 Among these lines will be your database username and password. Do
1088 not enable this option on a production Web site for any reason.
1090 - "Edit dataobject.ini with the following settings..." dataobject.ini
1091 is a development file for the DB_DataObject framework and is not
1092 used by the running software. It was removed from the Laconica
1093 distribution because its presence was confusing. Do not bother
1094 configuring dataobject.ini, and do not put your database username
1095 and password into the file on a production Web server; unscrupulous
1096 persons may try to read it to get your passwords.
1101 If you're adventurous or impatient, you may want to install the
1102 development version of Laconica. To get it, use the darcs version
1103 control tool (http://darcs.net/) like so:
1105 darcs get http://laconi.ca/darcs/ mublog
1107 To keep it up-to-date, use 'darcs pull'. Watch for conflicts!
1112 There are several ways to get more information about Laconica.
1114 * There is a mailing list for Laconica developers and admins at
1115 http://mail.laconi.ca/mailman/listinfo/laconica-dev
1116 * The #laconica IRC channel on freenode.net (http://www.freenode.net/).
1117 * The Laconica wiki, http://laconi.ca/trac/
1122 * Microblogging messages to http://identi.ca/evan are very welcome.
1123 * Laconica's Trac server has a bug tracker for any defects you may find,
1124 or ideas for making things better. http://laconi.ca/trac/
1125 * e-mail to evan@identi.ca will usually be read and responded to very
1126 quickly, unless the question is really hard.
1131 The following is an incomplete list of developers who've worked on
1132 Laconi.ca. Apologies for any oversight; please let evan@identi.ca know
1133 if anyone's been overlooked in error.
1135 * Evan Prodromou, founder and lead developer, Control Yourself, Inc.
1136 * Zach Copley, Control Yourself, Inc.
1137 * Earle Martin, Control Yourself, Inc.
1138 * Marie-Claude Doyon, designer, Control Yourself, Inc.
1139 * Sarven Capadisli, Control Yourself, Inc.
1140 * Robin Millette, Control Yourself, Inc.
1151 * Ken Sheppardson (Trac server, man-about-town)
1152 * Tiago 'gouki' Faria (entrans)
1153 * Tryggvi Björgvinsson
1155 Thanks also to the developers of our upstream library code and to the
1156 thousands of people who have tried out Identi.ca, installed Laconi.ca,
1157 told their friends, and built the Open Microblogging network to what