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 improvement version from version 0.6.0
75 (release 22 Sep 2008). Notable features of version 0.6.1 include:
77 - Direct messages (DMs) and Favorites (faves) are now available
78 through the Twitter-like API.
79 - All of the Twitter commands (see http://ur1.ca/7ru) are available
80 through SMS, IM, Web and API, although some are not functional (for
81 features Laconica does not yet support)
82 - 20 additional languages supported at various levels (some pretty
84 - Significant additional caching using memcached for most database
85 queries. Using memcached can significantly speed up a Laconica
86 instance with this version.
87 - All required external libraries are now available in extlib/
90 - Continued but poorly-documented experimental support for Postgresql.
92 NOTE: the database definition file, stoica.ini, has been renamed to
93 laconica.ini (since this is the recommended database name). If you
94 have a line in your config.php pointing to the old name, you'll need
100 The following software packages are *required* for this software to
103 - PHP 5.2.x. It may be possible to run this software on earlier
104 versions of PHP, but many of the functions used are only available
106 - MySQL 5.x. The Laconica database is stored, by default, in a MySQL
107 server. It has been primarily tested on 5.x servers, although it may
108 be possible to install on earlier (or later!) versions. The server
109 *must* support the MyISAM storage engine -- the default for most
110 MySQL servers -- *and* the InnoDB storage engine.
111 - A Web server. Preferably, you should have Apache 2.2.x with the
112 mod_rewrite extension installed and enabled.
114 Your PHP installation must include the following PHP extensions:
116 - Curl. This is for fetching files by HTTP.
117 - XMLWriter. This is for formatting XML and HTML output.
118 - MySQL. For accessing the database.
119 - GD. For scaling down avatar images.
120 - mbstring. For handling Unicode (UTF-8) encoded strings.
122 For some functionality, you will also need the following extensions:
124 - Memcache. A client for the memcached server, which caches database
125 information in volatile memory. This is important for adequate
126 performance on high-traffic sites. You will also need a memcached
127 server to store the data in.
128 - Mailparse. Efficient parsing of email requires this extension.
129 Submission by email or SMS-over-email uses this extension.
131 You will almost definitely get 2-3 times better performance from your
132 site if you install a PHP bytecode cache/accelerator. Some well-known
133 examples are: eaccelerator, Turck mmcache, xcache, apc. Zend Optimizer
134 is a proprietary accelerator installed on some hosting sites.
139 A number of external PHP libraries are used to provide basic
140 functionality and optional functionality for your system. For your
141 convenience, they are available in the "extlib" directory of this
142 package, and you do not have to download and install them. However,
143 you may want to keep them up-to-date with the latest upstream version,
144 and the URLs are listed here for your convenience.
146 - DB_DataObject http://pear.php.net/package/DB_DataObject
147 - Validate http://pear.php.net/package/Validate
148 - OpenID from OpenIDEnabled (not the PEAR version!). We decided
149 to use the openidenabled.com version since it's more widely
150 implemented, and seems to be better supported.
151 http://openidenabled.com/php-openid/
152 - PEAR DB. Although this is an older data access system (new
153 packages should probably use PHP DBO), the OpenID libraries
154 depend on PEAR DB so we use it here, too. DB_DataObject can
155 also use PEAR MDB2, which may give you better performance
156 but won't work with OpenID.
157 http://pear.php.net/package/DB
158 - OAuth.php from http://oauth.googlecode.com/svn/code/php/
159 - markdown.php from http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/
160 - PEAR Mail, for sending out mail notifications
161 http://pear.php.net/package/Mail
162 - PEAR Net_SMTP, if you use the SMTP factory for notifications
163 http://pear.php.net/package/Net_SMTP
164 - XMPPHP, the follow-up to Class.Jabber.php. Probably the best XMPP
165 library available for PHP. http://xmpphp.googlecode.com/. Note that
166 as of this writing the version of this library that is available in
167 the extlib directory is *significantly different* from the upstream
168 version (patches have been submitted). Upgrading to the upstream
169 version may render your Laconica site unable to send or receive XMPP
172 A design goal of Laconica is that the basic Web functionality should
173 work on even the most restrictive commercial hosting services.
174 However, additional functionality, such as receiving messages by
175 Jabber/GTalk, require that you be able to run long-running processes
176 on your account. In addition, posting by email or from SMS require
177 that you be able to install a mail filter in your mail server.
182 Installing the basic Laconica Web component is relatively easy,
183 especially if you've previously installed PHP/MySQL packages.
185 1. Unpack the tarball you downloaded on your Web server. Usually a
186 command like this will work:
188 tar zxf laconica-0.6.0.tar.gz
190 ...which will make a laconica-0.6.0 subdirectory in your current
191 directory. (If you don't have shell access on your Web server, you
192 may have to unpack the tarball on your local computer and FTP the
193 files to the server.)
195 2. Move the tarball to a directory of your choosing in your Web root
196 directory. Usually something like this will work:
198 mv laconica-0.6.0 /var/www/mublog
200 This will make your Laconica instance available in the mublog path of
201 your server, like "http://example.net/mublog". "microblog" or
202 "laconica" might also be good path names. If you know how to
203 configure virtual hosts on your web server, you can try setting up
204 "http://micro.example.net/" or the like.
206 3. You should also take this moment to make your avatar subdirectory
207 writeable by the Web server. An insecure way to do this is:
209 chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/avatar
211 On some systems, this will probably work:
213 chgrp www-data /var/www/mublog/avatar
214 chmod g+w /var/www/mublog/avatar
216 If your Web server runs as another user besides "www-data", try
217 that user's default group instead. As a last resort, you can create
218 a new group like "avatar" and add the Web server's user to the group.
220 4. Create a database to hold your microblog data. Something like this
223 mysqladmin -u "username" --password="password" create laconica
225 Note that Laconica must have its own database; you can't share the
226 database with another program. You can name it whatever you want,
229 (If you don't have shell access to your server, you may need to use
230 a tool like PHPAdmin to create a database. Check your hosting
231 service's documentation for how to create a new MySQL database.)
233 5. Run the laconica.sql SQL script in the db subdirectory to create
234 the database tables in the database. A typical system would work
237 mysql -u "username" --password="password" laconica < /var/www/mublog/db/laconica.sql
239 You may want to test by logging into the database and checking that
240 the tables were created. Here's an example:
244 6. Create a new database account that Laconica will use to access the
245 database. If you have shell access, this will probably work from the
248 GRANT SELECT,INSERT,DELETE,UPDATE on laconica.*
249 TO 'lacuser'@'localhost'
250 IDENTIFIED BY 'lacpassword';
252 You should change 'lacuser' and 'lacpassword' to your preferred new
253 username and password. You may want to test logging in as this new
254 user and testing that you can SELECT from some of the tables in the
255 DB (use SHOW TABLES to see which ones are there).
257 7. Copy the config.php.sample in the Laconica directory to config.php.
259 8. Edit config.php to set the basic configuration for your system.
260 (See descriptions below for basic config options.) Note that there
261 are lots of options and if you try to do them all at once, you will
262 have a hard time making sure what's working and what's not. So,
263 stick with the basics at first. In particular, customizing the
264 'site' and 'db' settings will almost definitely be needed.
266 9. At this point, you should be able to navigate in a browser to your
267 microblog's main directory and see the "Public Timeline", which
268 will be empty. If not, magic has happened! You can now register a
269 new user, post some notices, edit your profile, etc. However, you
270 may want to wait to do that stuff if you think you can set up
271 "fancy URLs" (see below), since some URLs are stored in the database.
276 By default, Laconica will have big long sloppy URLs that are hard for
277 people to remember or use. For example, a user's home profile might be
280 http://example.org/mublog/index.php?action=showstream&nickname=fred
282 It's possible to configure the software so it looks like this instead:
284 http://example.org/mublog/fred
286 These "fancy URLs" are more readable and memorable for users. To use
287 fancy URLs, you must either have Apache 2.2.x with .htaccess enabled
288 and mod_redirect enabled, -OR- know how to configure "url redirection"
291 1. Copy the htaccess.sample file to .htaccess in your Laconica
292 directory. Note: if you have control of your server's httpd.conf or
293 similar configuration files, it can greatly improve performance to
294 import the .htaccess file into your conf file instead. If you're
295 not sure how to do it, you may save yourself a lot of headache by
296 just leaving the .htaccess file.
298 2. Change the "RewriteBase" in the new .htaccess file to be the URL path
299 to your Laconica installation on your server. Typically this will
300 be the path to your Laconica directory relative to your Web root.
302 3. Add or uncomment or change a line in your config.php file so it says:
304 $config['site']['fancy'] = true;
306 You should now be able to navigate to a "fancy" URL on your server,
309 http://example.net/mublog/main/register
311 If you changed your HTTP server configuration, you may need to restart
314 If you have problems with the .htaccess file on versions of Apache
315 earlier than 2.2.x, try changing the regular expressions in the
316 htaccess.sample file that use "\w" to just use ".".
321 Laconica supports a cheap-and-dirty system for sending update messages
322 to mobile phones and for receiving updates from the mobile. Instead of
323 sending through the SMS network itself, which is costly and requires
324 buy-in from the wireless carriers, it simply piggybacks on the email
325 gateways that many carriers provide to their customers. So, SMS
326 configuration is essentially email configuration.
328 Each user sends to a made-up email address, which they keep a secret.
329 Incoming email that is "From" the user's SMS email address, and "To"
330 the users' secret email address on the site's domain, will be
331 converted to a message and stored in the DB.
333 For this to work, there *must* be a domain or sub-domain for which all
334 (or most) incoming email can pass through the incoming mail filter.
336 1. Run the SQL script carrier.sql in your Laconica database. This will
339 mysql -u "lacuser" --password="lacpassword" laconica < db/carrier.sql
341 This will populate your database with a list of wireless carriers
342 that support email SMS gateways.
344 2. Make sure the maildaemon.php file is executable:
346 chmod +x scripts/maildaemon.php
348 Note that "daemon" is kind of a misnomer here; the script is more
349 of a filter than a daemon.
351 2. Edit /etc/aliases on your mail server and add the following line:
353 *: /path/to/laconica/scripts/maildaemon.php
355 3. Run whatever code you need to to update your aliases database. For
356 many mail servers (Postfix, Exim, Sendmail), this should work:
360 You may need to restart your mail server for the new database to
363 4. Set the following in your config.php file:
365 $config['mail']['domain'] = 'yourdomain.example.net';
367 At this point, post-by-email and post-by-SMS-gateway should work. Note
368 that if your mail server is on a different computer from your email
369 server, you'll need to have a full installation of Laconica, a working
370 config.php, and access to the Laconica database from the mail server.
375 XMPP (eXtended Message and Presence Protocol, http://xmpp.org/) is the
376 instant-messenger protocol that drives Jabber and GTalk IM. You can
377 distribute messages via XMPP using the system below; however, you
378 need to run the XMPP incoming daemon to allow incoming messages as
381 1. You may want to strongly consider setting up your own XMPP server.
382 Ejabberd, OpenFire, and JabberD are all Open Source servers.
383 Jabber, Inc. provides a high-performance commercial server.
385 2. You must register a Jabber ID (JID) with your new server. It helps
386 to choose a name like "update@example.com" or "notice" or something
387 similar. Alternately, your "update JID" can be registered on a
388 publicly-available XMPP service, like jabber.org or GTalk.
390 Laconica will not register the JID with your chosen XMPP server;
391 you need to do this manually, with an XMPP client like Gajim,
392 Telepathy, or Pidgin.im.
394 3. Configure your site's XMPP variables, as described below in the
395 configuration section.
397 On a default installation, your site can broadcast messages using
398 XMPP. Users won't be able to post messages using XMPP unless you've
399 got the XMPP daemon running. See 'Queues and daemons' below for how
400 to set that up. Also, once you have a sizable number of users, sending
401 a lot of SMS, OMB, and XMPP messages whenever someone posts a message
402 can really slow down your site; it may cause posting to timeout.
404 NOTE: stream_select(), a crucial function for network programming, is
405 broken on PHP 5.2.x less than 5.2.6 on amd64-based servers. We don't
406 work around this bug in Laconica; current recommendation is to move
407 off of amd64 to another server.
412 You can send *all* messages from your microblogging site to a
413 third-party service using XMPP. This can be useful for providing
414 search, indexing, bridging, or other cool services.
416 To configure a downstream site to receive your public stream, add
417 their "JID" (Jabber ID) to your config.php as follows:
419 $config['xmpp']['public'][] = 'downstream@example.net';
421 (Don't miss those square brackets at the end.) Note that your XMPP
422 broadcasting must be configured as mentioned above. Although you can
423 send out messages at "Web time", high-volume sites should strongly
424 consider setting up queues and daemons.
429 Some activities that Laconica needs to do, like broadcast OMB, SMS,
430 and XMPP messages, can be 'queued' and done by off-line bots instead.
431 For this to work, you must be able to run long-running offline
432 processes, either on your main Web server or on another server you
433 control. (Your other server will still need all the above
434 prerequisites, with the exception of Apache.) Installing on a separate
435 server is probably a good idea for high-volume sites.
437 1. You'll need the "CLI" (command-line interface) version of PHP
438 installed on whatever server you use.
440 2. If you're using a separate server for queues, install Laconica
441 somewhere on the server. You don't need to worry about the
442 .htaccess file, but make sure that your config.php file is close
443 to, or identical to, your Web server's version.
445 3. In your config.php files (both the Web server and the queues
446 server!), set the following variable:
448 $config['queue']['enabled'] = true;
450 You may also want to look at the 'daemon' section of this file for
451 more daemon options. Note that if you set the 'user' and/or 'group'
452 options, you'll need to create that user and/or group by hand.
453 They're not created automatically.
455 4. On the queues server, run the command scripts/startdaemons.sh. It
456 needs as a parameter the install path; if you run it from the
457 Laconica dir, "." should suffice.
459 This will run six (for now) queue handlers:
461 * xmppdaemon.php - listens for new XMPP messages from users and stores
462 them as notices in the database.
463 * jabberqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
464 registered users who should receive them.
465 * publicqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
466 public feed listeners.
467 * ombqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to OpenMicroBlogging
468 recipients on foreign servers.
469 * smsqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to SMS-over-email addresses
471 * xmppconfirmhandler.php - sends confirmation messages to registered
474 Note that these queue daemons are pretty raw, and need your care. In
475 particular, they leak memory, and you may want to restart them on a
476 regular (daily or so) basis with a cron job. Also, if they lose
477 the connection to the XMPP server for too long, they'll simply die. It
478 may be a good idea to use a daemon-monitoring service, like 'monit',
479 to check their status and keep them running.
481 All the daemons write their process IDs (pids) to /var/run/ by
482 default. This can be useful for starting, stopping, and monitoring the
488 Sitemap files (http://sitemaps.org/) are a very nice way of telling
489 search engines and other interested bots what's available on your site
490 and what's changed recently. You can generate sitemap files for your
493 1. Choose your sitemap URL layout. Laconica creates a number of
494 sitemap XML files for different parts of your site. You may want to
495 put these in a sub-directory of your Laconica directory to avoid
496 clutter. The sitemap index file tells the search engines and other
497 bots where to find all the sitemap files; it *must* be in the main
498 installation directory or higher. Both types of file must be
499 available through HTTP.
501 2. To generate your sitemaps, run the following command on your server:
503 php scripts/sitemap.php -f index-file-path -d sitemap-directory -u URL-prefix-for-sitemaps
505 Here, index-file-path is the full path to the sitemap index file,
506 like './sitemapindex.xml'. sitemap-directory is the directory where
507 you want the sitemaps stored, like './sitemaps/' (make sure the dir
508 exists). URL-prefix-for-sitemaps is the full URL for the sitemap dir,
509 typically something like 'http://example.net/mublog/sitemaps/'.
511 You can use several methods for submitting your sitemap index to
512 search engines to get your site indexed. One is to add a line like the
513 following to your robots.txt file:
515 Sitemap: /mublog/sitemapindex.xml
517 This is a good idea for letting *all* Web spiders know about your
518 sitemap. You can also submit sitemap files to major search engines
519 using their respective "Webmaster centres"; see sitemaps.org for links
525 There are two themes shipped with this version of Laconica: "stoica",
526 which is what the Identi.ca site uses, and "default", which is a good
527 basis for other sites.
529 As of right now, your ability to change the theme is site-wide; users
530 can't choose their own theme. Additionally, the only thing you can
531 change in the theme is CSS stylesheets and some image files; you can't
532 change the HTML output, like adding or removing menu items.
534 You can choose a theme using the $config['site']['theme'] element in
535 the config.php file. See below for details.
537 You can add your own theme by making a sub-directory of the 'theme'
538 subdirectory with the name of your theme. Each theme can have the
541 display.css: a CSS2 file for "default" styling for all browsers.
542 ie6.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
544 ie7.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
546 logo.png: a logo image for the site.
547 default-avatar-profile.png: a 96x96 pixel image to use as the avatar for
548 users who don't upload their own.
549 default-avatar-stream.png: Ditto, but 48x48. For streams of notices.
550 default-avatar-mini.png: Ditto ditto, but 24x24. For subscriptions
551 listing on profile pages.
553 You may want to start by copying the files from the default theme to
559 Translations in Laconica use the gettext system (http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/).
560 Theoretically, you can add your own sub-directory to the locale/
561 subdirectory to add a new language to your system. You'll need to
562 compile the ".po" files into ".mo" files, however.
564 Contributions of translation information to Laconica are very easy:
565 you can use the Web interface at http://laconi.ca/entrans/ to add one
566 or a few or lots of new translations -- or even new languages. You can
567 also download more up-to-date .po files there, if you so desire.
572 There is no builtin system for doing backups in Laconica. You can make
573 backups of a working Laconica system by backing up the database and
574 the Web directory. To backup the database use mysqldump (http://ur1.ca/7xo)
575 and to backup the Web directory, try tar.
580 If you've been using Laconica 0.6, 0.5 or lower, or if you've been
581 tracking the "darcs" version of the software, you will probably want
582 to upgrade and keep your existing data. There is no automated upgrade
583 procedure in Laconica 0.6.1. Try these step-by-step instructions; read
584 to the end first before trying them.
586 0. Download Laconica and set up all the prerequisites as if you were
588 1. Make backups of both your database and your Web directory. UNDER NO
589 CIRCUMSTANCES should you try to do an upgrade without a known-good
590 backup. You have been warned.
591 2. Shut down Web access to your site, either by turning off your Web
592 server or by redirecting all pages to a "sorry, under maintenance"
594 3. Shut down XMPP access to your site, typically by shutting down the
595 xmppdaemon.php process and all other daemons that you're running.
596 If you've got "monit" or "cron" automatically restarting your
597 daemons, make sure to turn that off, too.
598 4. Shut down SMS and email access to your site. The easy way to do
599 this is to comment out the line piping incoming email to your
600 maildaemon.php file, and running something like "newaliases".
601 5. Once all writing processes to your site are turned off, make a
602 final backup of the Web directory and database.
603 6. Move your Laconica directory to a backup spot, like "mublog.bak".
604 7. Unpack your Laconica 0.6 tarball and move it to "mublog" or
605 wherever your code used to be.
606 8. Copy the config.php file and avatar directory from your old
607 directory to your new directory.
608 9. Copy htaccess.sample to .htaccess in the new directory. Change the
609 RewriteBase to use the correct path.
610 10. Rebuild the database. Go to your Laconica directory and run the
611 rebuilddb.sh script like this:
613 ./scripts/rebuilddb.sh rootuser rootpassword database db/laconica.sql
615 Here, rootuser and rootpassword are the username and password for a
616 user who can drop and create databases as well as tables; typically
617 that's _not_ the user Laconica runs as.
618 11. Use mysql client to log into your database and make sure that the
619 notice, user, profile, subscription etc. tables are non-empty.
620 12. Turn back on the Web server, and check that things still work.
621 13. Turn back on XMPP bots and email maildaemon. Note that the XMPP
622 bots have changed since version 0.5; see above for details.
624 If you're upgrading from very old versions, you may want to look at
625 the fixup_* scripts in the scripts directories. These will store some
626 precooked data in the DB.
628 NOTE: the database definition file, stoica.ini, has been renamed to
629 laconica.ini (since this is the recommended database name). If you
630 have a line in your config.php pointing to the old name, you'll need
633 Configuration options
634 =====================
636 The sole configuration file for Laconica (excepting configurations for
637 dependency software) is config.php in your Laconica directory. If you
638 edit any other file in the directory, like lib/common.php (where most
639 of the defaults are defined), you will lose your configuration options
640 in any upgrade, and you will wish that you had been more careful.
642 Almost all configuration options are made through a two-dimensional
643 associative array, cleverly named $config. A typical configuration
646 $config['section']['option'] = value;
648 For brevity, the following documentation describes each section and
654 This section is a catch-all for site-wide variables.
656 name: the name of your site, like 'YourCompany Microblog'.
657 server: the server part of your site's URLs, like 'example.net'.
658 path: The path part of your site's URLs, like 'mublog' or '/'
660 fancy: whether or not your site uses fancy URLs (see Fancy URLs
661 section above). Default is false.
662 logfile: full path to a file for Laconica to save logging
663 information to. You may want to use this if you don't have
665 locale_path: full path to the directory for locale data. Unless you
666 store all your locale data in one place, you probably
667 don't need to use this.
668 language: default language for your site. Defaults to US English.
669 languages: A list of languages supported on your site. Typically you'd
670 only change this if you wanted to disable support for one
672 "unset($config['site']['languages']['de'])" will disable
674 theme: Theme for your site (see Theme section). Two themes are
675 provided by default: 'default' and 'stoica' (the one used by
676 Identi.ca). It's appreciated if you don't use the 'stoica' theme
677 except as the basis for your own.
678 email: contact email address for your site. By default, it's extracted
679 from your Web server environment; you may want to customize it.
680 broughtbyurl: name of an organization or individual who provides the
681 service. Each page will include a link to this name in the
682 footer. A good way to link to the blog, forum, wiki,
683 corporate portal, or whoever is making the service available.
684 broughtby: text used for the "brought by" link.
685 timezone: default timezone for message display. Users can set their
686 own time zone. Defaults to 'UTC', which is a pretty good default.
687 closed: If set to 'true', will disallow registration on your site.
688 This is a cheap way to restrict accounts to only one
689 individual or group; just register the accounts you want on
690 the service, *then* set this variable to 'true'.
695 This section is a reference to the configuration options for
696 DB_DataObject (see http://ur1.ca/7xp). The ones that you may want to
697 set are listed below for clarity.
699 database: a DSN (Data Source Name) for your Laconica database. This is
700 in the format 'protocol://username:password@hostname/databasename',
701 where 'protocol' is 'mysql' (or possibly 'postgresql', if you
702 really know what you're doing), 'username' is the username,
703 'password' is the password, and etc.
704 ini_yourdbname: if your database is not named 'laconica', you'll need
705 to set this to point to the location of the
706 laconica.ini file. Note that the real name of your database
707 should go in there, not literally 'yourdbname'.
708 db_driver: You can try changing this to 'MDB2' to use the other driver
709 type for DB_DataObject, but note that it breaks the OpenID
710 libraries, which only support PEAR::DB.
711 debug: On a database error, you may get a message saying to set this
712 value to 5 to see debug messages in the browser. This breaks
713 just about all pages, and will also expose the username and
715 quote_identifiers: Set this to true if you're using postgresql.
716 type: either 'mysql' or 'postgresql' (used for some bits of
717 database-type-specific SQL in the code). Defaults to mysql.
718 mirror: you can set this to an array of DSNs, like the above
719 'database' value. If it's set, certain read-only actions will
720 use a random value out of this array for the database, rather
721 than the one in 'database' (actually, 'database' is overwritten).
722 You can offload a busy DB server by setting up MySQL replication
723 and adding the slaves to this array. Note that if you want some
724 requests to go to the 'database' (master) server, you'll need
725 to include it in this array, too.
730 By default, Laconica sites log error messages to the syslog facility.
731 (You can override this using the 'logfile' parameter described above).
733 appname: The name that Laconica uses to log messages. By default it's
734 "laconica", but if you have more than one installation on the
735 server, you may want to change the name for each instance so
736 you can track log messages more easily.
741 You can configure the software to queue time-consuming tasks, like
742 sending out SMS email or XMPP messages, for off-line processing. See
743 'Queues and daemons' above for how to set this up.
745 enabled: Whether to uses queues. Defaults to false.
750 The default license to use for your users notices. The default is the
751 Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which is probably the right
752 choice for any public site. Note that some other servers will not
753 accept notices if you apply a stricter license than this.
755 url: URL of the license, used for links.
756 title: Title for the license, like 'Creative Commons Attribution 3.0'.
757 image: A button shown on each page for the license.
762 This is for configuring out-going email. We use PEAR's Mail module,
763 see: http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.mail.mail.factory.php
765 backend: the backend to use for mail, one of 'mail', 'sendmail', and
766 'smtp'. Defaults to PEAR's default, 'mail'.
767 params: if the mail backend requires any parameters, you can provide
768 them in an associative array.
773 This is for configuring nicknames in the service.
775 blacklist: an array of strings for usernames that may not be
776 registered. A default array exists for strings that are
777 used by Laconica (e.g. 'doc', 'main', 'avatar', 'theme')
778 but you may want to add others if you have other software
779 installed in a subdirectory of Laconica or if you just
780 don't want certain words used as usernames.
785 For configuring avatar access.
787 server: If set, defines another server where avatars are stored in the
788 root directory. Note that the 'avatar' subdir still has to be
789 writeable. You'd typically use this to split HTTP requests on
790 the client to speed up page loading, either with another
791 virtual server or with an NFS or SAMBA share. Clients
792 typically only make 2 connections to a single server at a
793 time (http://ur1.ca/6ih), so this can parallelize the job.
799 For configuring the public stream.
801 localonly: If set to true, only messages posted by users of this
802 service (rather than other services, filtered through OMB)
803 are shown in the public stream. Default true.
808 server: Like avatars, you can speed up page loading by pointing the
809 theme file lookup to another server (virtual or real). The
810 theme server's root path should map to the Laconica "theme"
811 subdirectory. Defaults to NULL.
816 For configuring the XMPP sub-system.
818 enabled: Whether to accept and send messages by XMPP. Default false.
819 server: server part of XMPP ID for update user.
820 port: connection port for clients. Default 5222, which you probably
821 shouldn't need to change.
822 user: username for the client connection. Users will receive messages
823 from 'user'@'server'.
824 resource: a unique identifier for the connection to the server. This
825 is actually used as a prefix for each XMPP component in the system.
826 password: password for the user account.
827 host: some XMPP domains are served by machines with a different
828 hostname. (For example, @gmail.com GTalk users connect to
829 talk.google.com). Set this to the correct hostname if that's the
830 case with your server.
831 encryption: Whether to encrypt the connection between Laconica and the
832 XMPP server. Defaults to true, but you can get
833 considerably better performance turning it off if you're
834 connecting to a server on the same machine or on a
836 debug: if turned on, this will make the XMPP library blurt out all of
837 the incoming and outgoing messages as XML stanzas. Use as a
838 last resort, and never turn it on if you don't have queues
839 enabled, since it will spit out sensitive data to the browser.
840 public: an array of JIDs to send _all_ notices to. This is useful for
841 participating in third-party search and archiving services.
846 Miscellaneous tagging stuff.
848 dropoff: Decay factor for tag listing, in seconds.
849 Defaults to exponential decay over ten days; you can twiddle
850 with it to try and get better results for your site.
855 For daemon processes.
857 piddir: directory that daemon processes should write their PID file
858 (process ID) to. Defaults to /var/run/, which is where this
859 stuff should usually go on Unix-ish systems.
860 user: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective user ID
861 to this user before running. Probably a good idea, especially if
862 you start the daemons as root. Note: user name, like 'daemon',
864 group: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective group ID
865 to this named group. Again, a name, not a numerical ID.
870 You can get a significant boost in performance by caching some
871 database data in memcached (http://www.danga.com/memcached/).
873 enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
874 server: a string with the hostname of the memcached server. Can also
875 be an array of hostnames, if you've got more than one server.
880 A catch-all for integration with other systems.
882 source: The name to use for the source of posts to Twitter. Defaults
883 to 'laconica', but if you request your own source name from
884 Twitter (http://twitter.com/help/request_source), you can use
885 that here instead. Status updates on Twitter will then have
891 The primary output for Laconica is syslog, unless you configured a
892 separate logfile. This is probably the first place to look if you're
893 getting weird behaviour from Laconica.
895 If you're tracking the unstable version of Laconica in the darcs
896 repository (see below), and you get a compilation error ("unexpected
897 T_STRING") in the browser, check to see that you don't have any
898 conflicts in your code.
903 These are some myths you may see on the Web about Laconica.
904 Documentation from the core team about Laconica has been pretty
905 sparse, so some backtracking and guesswork resulted in some incorrect
908 - "Set $config['db']['debug'] = 5 to debug the database." This is an
909 extremely bad idea. It's a tool built into DB_DataObject that will
910 emit oodles of print lines directly to the browser of your users.
911 Among these lines will be your database username and password. Do
912 not enable this option on a production Web site for any reason.
914 - "Edit dataobject.ini with the following settings..." dataobject.ini
915 is a development file for the DB_DataObject framework and is not
916 used by the running software. It was removed from the Laconica
917 distribution because its presence was confusing. Do not bother
918 configuring dataobject.ini, and do not put your database username
919 and password into the file on a production Web server; unscrupulous
920 persons may try to read it to get your passwords.
925 If you're adventurous or impatient, you may want to install the
926 development version of Laconica. To get it, use the darcs version
927 control tool (http://darcs.net/) like so:
929 darcs get http://laconi.ca/darcs/ mublog
931 To keep it up-to-date, use 'darcs pull'. Watch for conflicts!
936 There are several ways to get more information about Laconica.
938 * There is a mailing list for Laconica developers and admins at
939 http://mail.laconi.ca/mailman/listinfo/laconica-dev
940 * The #laconica IRC channel on freenode.net (http://www.freenode.net/).
941 * The Laconica wiki, http://laconi.ca/trac/
946 * Microblogging messages to http://identi.ca/evan are very welcome.
947 * Laconica's Trac server has a bug tracker for any defects you may find,
948 or ideas for making things better. http://laconi.ca/trac/
949 * e-mail to evan@identi.ca will usually be read and responded to very
950 quickly, unless the question is really hard.
955 The following is an incomplete list of developers who've worked on
956 Laconi.ca. Apologies for any oversight; please let evan@identi.ca know
957 if anyone's been overlooked in error.
959 * Evan Prodromou, founder and lead developer, Control Yourself, Inc.
960 * Zach Copley, Control Yourself, Inc.
961 * Earle Martin, Control Yourself, Inc.
962 * Marie-Claude Doyon, designer, Control Yourself, Inc.
973 * Ken Sheppardson (Trac server, man-about-town)
974 * Tiago 'gouki' Faria (entrans)
976 Thanks also to the thousands of people who have tried out Identi.ca,
977 installed Laconi.ca, told their friends, and built the Open
978 Microblogging network to what it is today.