5 Laconica 0.6.3 ("Gardening at Night")
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 0.6.2 (release 13 Nov 2008). Notable features of version 0.6.3 include:
77 - 'nudge' functionality to tell a user that they're missed.
78 - Links to related RSS/Atom feeds on all pages.
79 - Favor/disfavor icons changed to images.
80 - Better checks to prevent remote subscribing to a local user, causing
81 "ghost profiles" (dupes in people search or subscriptions lists).
82 - Twitter friend sync. Users who set up their Twitter accounts will
83 be automatically connected to other local users who have Twitter
84 accounts and who they're subscribed to on Twitter.
85 - List view of subscriptions/subscribers.
86 - Subscribe/unsubscribe button on subscriptions/subscribers list.
87 - Optionally hide certain users from the public stream.
88 - Give public area a few more tabs.
89 - Add Featured users tab to public area.
90 - Add Most favorited notices tab to public area.
91 - Users can give themselves tags.
92 - Users can tag their subscribers or subscriptions.
93 - Users can send @-replies to tagged subsets of their contact list
95 - Subscribe/unsubscribe with Ajax form.
96 - Post notice with Ajax form.
97 - Script to optionally add notice inboxes for only some users.
98 - Incremental caching of notice streams using memcached.
99 - Use cached favorites info to avoid excess DB hits for faves.
100 - Optionally use Sphinx Search for notice search.
101 - Optionally use Sphinx Search for people search.
102 - FOAF URL link on profile page.
103 - HTML correction for repeated @id attributes in favorites forms.
108 The following software packages are *required* for this software to
111 - PHP 5.2.x. It may be possible to run this software on earlier
112 versions of PHP, but many of the functions used are only available
114 - MySQL 5.x. The Laconica database is stored, by default, in a MySQL
115 server. It has been primarily tested on 5.x servers, although it may
116 be possible to install on earlier (or later!) versions. The server
117 *must* support the MyISAM storage engine -- the default for most
118 MySQL servers -- *and* the InnoDB storage engine.
119 - A Web server. Preferably, you should have Apache 2.2.x with the
120 mod_rewrite extension installed and enabled.
122 Your PHP installation must include the following PHP extensions:
124 - Curl. This is for fetching files by HTTP.
125 - XMLWriter. This is for formatting XML and HTML output.
126 - MySQL. For accessing the database.
127 - GD. For scaling down avatar images.
128 - mbstring. For handling Unicode (UTF-8) encoded strings.
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
185 A design goal of Laconica is that the basic Web functionality should
186 work on even the most restrictive commercial hosting services.
187 However, additional functionality, such as receiving messages by
188 Jabber/GTalk, require that you be able to run long-running processes
189 on your account. In addition, posting by email or from SMS require
190 that you be able to install a mail filter in your mail server.
195 Installing the basic Laconica Web component is relatively easy,
196 especially if you've previously installed PHP/MySQL packages.
198 1. Unpack the tarball you downloaded on your Web server. Usually a
199 command like this will work:
201 tar zxf laconica-0.6.2.tar.gz
203 ...which will make a laconica-0.6.2 subdirectory in your current
204 directory. (If you don't have shell access on your Web server, you
205 may have to unpack the tarball on your local computer and FTP the
206 files to the server.)
208 2. Move the tarball to a directory of your choosing in your Web root
209 directory. Usually something like this will work:
211 mv laconica-0.6.2 /var/www/mublog
213 This will make your Laconica instance available in the mublog path of
214 your server, like "http://example.net/mublog". "microblog" or
215 "laconica" might also be good path names. If you know how to
216 configure virtual hosts on your web server, you can try setting up
217 "http://micro.example.net/" or the like.
219 3. You should also take this moment to make your avatar subdirectory
220 writeable by the Web server. An insecure way to do this is:
222 chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/avatar
224 On some systems, this will probably work:
226 chgrp www-data /var/www/mublog/avatar
227 chmod g+w /var/www/mublog/avatar
229 If your Web server runs as another user besides "www-data", try
230 that user's default group instead. As a last resort, you can create
231 a new group like "avatar" and add the Web server's user to the group.
233 4. Create a database to hold your microblog data. Something like this
236 mysqladmin -u "username" --password="password" create laconica
238 Note that Laconica must have its own database; you can't share the
239 database with another program. You can name it whatever you want,
242 (If you don't have shell access to your server, you may need to use
243 a tool like PHPAdmin to create a database. Check your hosting
244 service's documentation for how to create a new MySQL database.)
246 5. Run the laconica.sql SQL script in the db subdirectory to create
247 the database tables in the database. A typical system would work
250 mysql -u "username" --password="password" laconica < /var/www/mublog/db/laconica.sql
252 You may want to test by logging into the database and checking that
253 the tables were created. Here's an example:
257 6. Create a new database account that Laconica will use to access the
258 database. If you have shell access, this will probably work from the
261 GRANT SELECT,INSERT,DELETE,UPDATE on laconica.*
262 TO 'lacuser'@'localhost'
263 IDENTIFIED BY 'lacpassword';
265 You should change 'lacuser' and 'lacpassword' to your preferred new
266 username and password. You may want to test logging in as this new
267 user and testing that you can SELECT from some of the tables in the
268 DB (use SHOW TABLES to see which ones are there).
270 7. Copy the config.php.sample in the Laconica directory to config.php.
272 8. Edit config.php to set the basic configuration for your system.
273 (See descriptions below for basic config options.) Note that there
274 are lots of options and if you try to do them all at once, you will
275 have a hard time making sure what's working and what's not. So,
276 stick with the basics at first. In particular, customizing the
277 'site' and 'db' settings will almost definitely be needed.
279 9. At this point, you should be able to navigate in a browser to your
280 microblog's main directory and see the "Public Timeline", which
281 will be empty. If not, magic has happened! You can now register a
282 new user, post some notices, edit your profile, etc. However, you
283 may want to wait to do that stuff if you think you can set up
284 "fancy URLs" (see below), since some URLs are stored in the database.
289 By default, Laconica will have big long sloppy URLs that are hard for
290 people to remember or use. For example, a user's home profile might be
293 http://example.org/mublog/index.php?action=showstream&nickname=fred
295 It's possible to configure the software so it looks like this instead:
297 http://example.org/mublog/fred
299 These "fancy URLs" are more readable and memorable for users. To use
300 fancy URLs, you must either have Apache 2.2.x with .htaccess enabled
301 and mod_redirect enabled, -OR- know how to configure "url redirection"
304 1. Copy the htaccess.sample file to .htaccess in your Laconica
305 directory. Note: if you have control of your server's httpd.conf or
306 similar configuration files, it can greatly improve performance to
307 import the .htaccess file into your conf file instead. If you're
308 not sure how to do it, you may save yourself a lot of headache by
309 just leaving the .htaccess file.
311 2. Change the "RewriteBase" in the new .htaccess file to be the URL path
312 to your Laconica installation on your server. Typically this will
313 be the path to your Laconica directory relative to your Web root.
315 3. Add or uncomment or change a line in your config.php file so it says:
317 $config['site']['fancy'] = true;
319 You should now be able to navigate to a "fancy" URL on your server,
322 http://example.net/mublog/main/register
324 If you changed your HTTP server configuration, you may need to restart
327 If you have problems with the .htaccess file on versions of Apache
328 earlier than 2.2.x, try changing the regular expressions in the
329 htaccess.sample file that use "\w" to just use ".".
334 To use a Sphinx server to search users and notices, you also need
335 to install, compile and enable the sphinx pecl extension for php on the
336 client side, which itself depends on the sphinx development files.
337 "pecl install sphinx" should take care of that. Add "extension=sphinx.so"
338 to your php.ini and reload apache to enable it.
340 You can update your MySQL or Postgresql databases to drop their fulltext
341 search indexes, since they're now provided by sphinx.
343 On the sphinx server side, a script reads the main database and build
344 the keyword index. A cron job reads the database and keeps the sphinx
345 indexes up to date. scripts/sphinx-cron.sh should be called by cron
346 every 5 minutes, for example. scripts/sphinx.sh is an init.d script
347 to start and stop the sphinx search daemon.
352 Laconica supports a cheap-and-dirty system for sending update messages
353 to mobile phones and for receiving updates from the mobile. Instead of
354 sending through the SMS network itself, which is costly and requires
355 buy-in from the wireless carriers, it simply piggybacks on the email
356 gateways that many carriers provide to their customers. So, SMS
357 configuration is essentially email configuration.
359 Each user sends to a made-up email address, which they keep a secret.
360 Incoming email that is "From" the user's SMS email address, and "To"
361 the users' secret email address on the site's domain, will be
362 converted to a message and stored in the DB.
364 For this to work, there *must* be a domain or sub-domain for which all
365 (or most) incoming email can pass through the incoming mail filter.
367 1. Run the SQL script carrier.sql in your Laconica database. This will
370 mysql -u "lacuser" --password="lacpassword" laconica < db/carrier.sql
372 This will populate your database with a list of wireless carriers
373 that support email SMS gateways.
375 2. Make sure the maildaemon.php file is executable:
377 chmod +x scripts/maildaemon.php
379 Note that "daemon" is kind of a misnomer here; the script is more
380 of a filter than a daemon.
382 2. Edit /etc/aliases on your mail server and add the following line:
384 *: /path/to/laconica/scripts/maildaemon.php
386 3. Run whatever code you need to to update your aliases database. For
387 many mail servers (Postfix, Exim, Sendmail), this should work:
391 You may need to restart your mail server for the new database to
394 4. Set the following in your config.php file:
396 $config['mail']['domain'] = 'yourdomain.example.net';
398 At this point, post-by-email and post-by-SMS-gateway should work. Note
399 that if your mail server is on a different computer from your email
400 server, you'll need to have a full installation of Laconica, a working
401 config.php, and access to the Laconica database from the mail server.
406 XMPP (eXtended Message and Presence Protocol, http://xmpp.org/) is the
407 instant-messenger protocol that drives Jabber and GTalk IM. You can
408 distribute messages via XMPP using the system below; however, you
409 need to run the XMPP incoming daemon to allow incoming messages as
412 1. You may want to strongly consider setting up your own XMPP server.
413 Ejabberd, OpenFire, and JabberD are all Open Source servers.
414 Jabber, Inc. provides a high-performance commercial server.
416 2. You must register a Jabber ID (JID) with your new server. It helps
417 to choose a name like "update@example.com" or "notice" or something
418 similar. Alternately, your "update JID" can be registered on a
419 publicly-available XMPP service, like jabber.org or GTalk.
421 Laconica will not register the JID with your chosen XMPP server;
422 you need to do this manually, with an XMPP client like Gajim,
423 Telepathy, or Pidgin.im.
425 3. Configure your site's XMPP variables, as described below in the
426 configuration section.
428 On a default installation, your site can broadcast messages using
429 XMPP. Users won't be able to post messages using XMPP unless you've
430 got the XMPP daemon running. See 'Queues and daemons' below for how
431 to set that up. Also, once you have a sizable number of users, sending
432 a lot of SMS, OMB, and XMPP messages whenever someone posts a message
433 can really slow down your site; it may cause posting to timeout.
435 NOTE: stream_select(), a crucial function for network programming, is
436 broken on PHP 5.2.x less than 5.2.6 on amd64-based servers. We don't
437 work around this bug in Laconica; current recommendation is to move
438 off of amd64 to another server.
443 You can send *all* messages from your microblogging site to a
444 third-party service using XMPP. This can be useful for providing
445 search, indexing, bridging, or other cool services.
447 To configure a downstream site to receive your public stream, add
448 their "JID" (Jabber ID) to your config.php as follows:
450 $config['xmpp']['public'][] = 'downstream@example.net';
452 (Don't miss those square brackets at the end.) Note that your XMPP
453 broadcasting must be configured as mentioned above. Although you can
454 send out messages at "Web time", high-volume sites should strongly
455 consider setting up queues and daemons.
460 Some activities that Laconica needs to do, like broadcast OMB, SMS,
461 and XMPP messages, can be 'queued' and done by off-line bots instead.
462 For this to work, you must be able to run long-running offline
463 processes, either on your main Web server or on another server you
464 control. (Your other server will still need all the above
465 prerequisites, with the exception of Apache.) Installing on a separate
466 server is probably a good idea for high-volume sites.
468 1. You'll need the "CLI" (command-line interface) version of PHP
469 installed on whatever server you use.
471 2. If you're using a separate server for queues, install Laconica
472 somewhere on the server. You don't need to worry about the
473 .htaccess file, but make sure that your config.php file is close
474 to, or identical to, your Web server's version.
476 3. In your config.php files (both the Web server and the queues
477 server!), set the following variable:
479 $config['queue']['enabled'] = true;
481 You may also want to look at the 'daemon' section of this file for
482 more daemon options. Note that if you set the 'user' and/or 'group'
483 options, you'll need to create that user and/or group by hand.
484 They're not created automatically.
486 4. On the queues server, run the command scripts/startdaemons.sh. It
487 needs as a parameter the install path; if you run it from the
488 Laconica dir, "." should suffice.
490 This will run six (for now) queue handlers:
492 * xmppdaemon.php - listens for new XMPP messages from users and stores
493 them as notices in the database.
494 * jabberqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
495 registered users who should receive them.
496 * publicqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
497 public feed listeners.
498 * ombqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to OpenMicroBlogging
499 recipients on foreign servers.
500 * smsqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to SMS-over-email addresses
502 * xmppconfirmhandler.php - sends confirmation messages to registered
505 Note that these queue daemons are pretty raw, and need your care. In
506 particular, they leak memory, and you may want to restart them on a
507 regular (daily or so) basis with a cron job. Also, if they lose
508 the connection to the XMPP server for too long, they'll simply die. It
509 may be a good idea to use a daemon-monitoring service, like 'monit',
510 to check their status and keep them running.
512 All the daemons write their process IDs (pids) to /var/run/ by
513 default. This can be useful for starting, stopping, and monitoring the
516 Twitter Friends Syncing
517 -----------------------
519 As of Laconica 0.6.3, users may set a flag in their settings ("Subscribe
520 to my Twitter friends here" under the Twitter tab) to have Laconica
521 attempt to locate and subscribe to "friends" (people they "follow") on
522 Twitter who also have accounts on your Laconica system, and who have
523 previously set up a link for automatically posting notices to Twitter.
525 Optionally, there is a script (./scripts/synctwitterfriends.php), meant
526 to be run periodically from a job scheduler (e.g.: cron under Unix), to
527 look for new additions to users' friends lists. Note that the friends
528 syncing only subscribes users to each other, it does not unsubscribe
529 users when they stop following each other on Twitter.
533 # Update Twitter friends subscriptions every half hour
534 0,30 * * * * /path/to/php /path/to/laconica/scripts/synctwitterfriends.php>&/dev/null
539 Sitemap files (http://sitemaps.org/) are a very nice way of telling
540 search engines and other interested bots what's available on your site
541 and what's changed recently. You can generate sitemap files for your
544 1. Choose your sitemap URL layout. Laconica creates a number of
545 sitemap XML files for different parts of your site. You may want to
546 put these in a sub-directory of your Laconica directory to avoid
547 clutter. The sitemap index file tells the search engines and other
548 bots where to find all the sitemap files; it *must* be in the main
549 installation directory or higher. Both types of file must be
550 available through HTTP.
552 2. To generate your sitemaps, run the following command on your server:
554 php scripts/sitemap.php -f index-file-path -d sitemap-directory -u URL-prefix-for-sitemaps
556 Here, index-file-path is the full path to the sitemap index file,
557 like './sitemapindex.xml'. sitemap-directory is the directory where
558 you want the sitemaps stored, like './sitemaps/' (make sure the dir
559 exists). URL-prefix-for-sitemaps is the full URL for the sitemap dir,
560 typically something like 'http://example.net/mublog/sitemaps/'.
562 You can use several methods for submitting your sitemap index to
563 search engines to get your site indexed. One is to add a line like the
564 following to your robots.txt file:
566 Sitemap: /mublog/sitemapindex.xml
568 This is a good idea for letting *all* Web spiders know about your
569 sitemap. You can also submit sitemap files to major search engines
570 using their respective "Webmaster centres"; see sitemaps.org for links
576 There are two themes shipped with this version of Laconica: "stoica",
577 which is what the Identi.ca site uses, and "default", which is a good
578 basis for other sites.
580 As of right now, your ability to change the theme is site-wide; users
581 can't choose their own theme. Additionally, the only thing you can
582 change in the theme is CSS stylesheets and some image files; you can't
583 change the HTML output, like adding or removing menu items.
585 You can choose a theme using the $config['site']['theme'] element in
586 the config.php file. See below for details.
588 You can add your own theme by making a sub-directory of the 'theme'
589 subdirectory with the name of your theme. Each theme can have the
592 display.css: a CSS2 file for "default" styling for all browsers.
593 ie6.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
595 ie7.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
597 logo.png: a logo image for the site.
598 default-avatar-profile.png: a 96x96 pixel image to use as the avatar for
599 users who don't upload their own.
600 default-avatar-stream.png: Ditto, but 48x48. For streams of notices.
601 default-avatar-mini.png: Ditto ditto, but 24x24. For subscriptions
602 listing on profile pages.
604 You may want to start by copying the files from the default theme to
610 Translations in Laconica use the gettext system (http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/).
611 Theoretically, you can add your own sub-directory to the locale/
612 subdirectory to add a new language to your system. You'll need to
613 compile the ".po" files into ".mo" files, however.
615 Contributions of translation information to Laconica are very easy:
616 you can use the Web interface at http://laconi.ca/entrans/ to add one
617 or a few or lots of new translations -- or even new languages. You can
618 also download more up-to-date .po files there, if you so desire.
623 There is no built-in system for doing backups in Laconica. You can make
624 backups of a working Laconica system by backing up the database and
625 the Web directory. To backup the database use mysqldump (http://ur1.ca/7xo)
626 and to backup the Web directory, try tar.
631 If you've been using Laconica 0.6, 0.5 or lower, or if you've been
632 tracking the "darcs" version of the software, you will probably want
633 to upgrade and keep your existing data. There is no automated upgrade
634 procedure in Laconica 0.6.2. Try these step-by-step instructions; read
635 to the end first before trying them.
637 0. Download Laconica and set up all the prerequisites as if you were
639 1. Make backups of both your database and your Web directory. UNDER NO
640 CIRCUMSTANCES should you try to do an upgrade without a known-good
641 backup. You have been warned.
642 2. Shut down Web access to your site, either by turning off your Web
643 server or by redirecting all pages to a "sorry, under maintenance"
645 3. Shut down XMPP access to your site, typically by shutting down the
646 xmppdaemon.php process and all other daemons that you're running.
647 If you've got "monit" or "cron" automatically restarting your
648 daemons, make sure to turn that off, too.
649 4. Shut down SMS and email access to your site. The easy way to do
650 this is to comment out the line piping incoming email to your
651 maildaemon.php file, and running something like "newaliases".
652 5. Once all writing processes to your site are turned off, make a
653 final backup of the Web directory and database.
654 6. Move your Laconica directory to a backup spot, like "mublog.bak".
655 7. Unpack your Laconica 0.6 tarball and move it to "mublog" or
656 wherever your code used to be.
657 8. Copy the config.php file and avatar directory from your old
658 directory to your new directory.
659 9. Copy htaccess.sample to .htaccess in the new directory. Change the
660 RewriteBase to use the correct path.
661 10. Rebuild the database. Go to your Laconica directory and run the
662 rebuilddb.sh script like this:
664 ./scripts/rebuilddb.sh rootuser rootpassword database db/laconica.sql
666 Here, rootuser and rootpassword are the username and password for a
667 user who can drop and create databases as well as tables; typically
668 that's _not_ the user Laconica runs as.
669 11. Use mysql client to log into your database and make sure that the
670 notice, user, profile, subscription etc. tables are non-empty.
671 12. Turn back on the Web server, and check that things still work.
672 13. Turn back on XMPP bots and email maildaemon. Note that the XMPP
673 bots have changed since version 0.5; see above for details.
675 If you're upgrading from very old versions, you may want to look at
676 the fixup_* scripts in the scripts directories. These will store some
677 precooked data in the DB. All upgraders should check out the inboxes
680 NOTE: the database definition file, stoica.ini, has been renamed to
681 laconica.ini (since this is the recommended database name). If you
682 have a line in your config.php pointing to the old name, you'll need
688 Before version 0.6.2, the page showing all notices from people the
689 user is subscribed to ("so-and-so with friends") was calculated at run
690 time. Starting with 0.6.2, we have a new data structure for holding a
691 user's "notice inbox". (Note: distinct from the "message inbox", which
692 is the "inbox" tab in the UI. The notice inbox appears under the
695 Notices are added to the inbox when they're created. This speeds up
696 the query considerably, and also allows us the opportunity, in the
697 future, to add different kind of notices to an inbox -- like @-replies
698 or subscriptions to search terms or hashtags.
700 Notice inboxes are enabled by default for new installations. If you
701 are upgrading an existing site, this means that your users will see
702 empty "Personal" pages. The following steps will help you fix the
705 0. $config['inboxes']['enabled'] can be set to one of three values. If
706 you set it to 'false', the site will work as before. Support for this
707 will probably be dropped in future versions.
708 1. Setting the flag to 'transitional' means that you're in transition.
709 In this mode, the code will run the "new query" or the "old query"
710 based on whether the user's inbox has been updated.
711 2. After setting the flag to "transitional", you can run the
712 fixup_inboxes.php script to create the inboxes. You may want to set
713 the memory limit high. You can re-run it without ill effect.
714 3. When fixup_inboxes is finished, you can set the enabled flag to
717 Configuration options
718 =====================
720 The sole configuration file for Laconica (excepting configurations for
721 dependency software) is config.php in your Laconica directory. If you
722 edit any other file in the directory, like lib/common.php (where most
723 of the defaults are defined), you will lose your configuration options
724 in any upgrade, and you will wish that you had been more careful.
726 Almost all configuration options are made through a two-dimensional
727 associative array, cleverly named $config. A typical configuration
730 $config['section']['option'] = value;
732 For brevity, the following documentation describes each section and
738 This section is a catch-all for site-wide variables.
740 name: the name of your site, like 'YourCompany Microblog'.
741 server: the server part of your site's URLs, like 'example.net'.
742 path: The path part of your site's URLs, like 'mublog' or '/'
744 fancy: whether or not your site uses fancy URLs (see Fancy URLs
745 section above). Default is false.
746 logfile: full path to a file for Laconica to save logging
747 information to. You may want to use this if you don't have
749 locale_path: full path to the directory for locale data. Unless you
750 store all your locale data in one place, you probably
751 don't need to use this.
752 language: default language for your site. Defaults to US English.
753 languages: A list of languages supported on your site. Typically you'd
754 only change this if you wanted to disable support for one
756 "unset($config['site']['languages']['de'])" will disable
758 theme: Theme for your site (see Theme section). Two themes are
759 provided by default: 'default' and 'stoica' (the one used by
760 Identi.ca). It's appreciated if you don't use the 'stoica' theme
761 except as the basis for your own.
762 email: contact email address for your site. By default, it's extracted
763 from your Web server environment; you may want to customize it.
764 broughtbyurl: name of an organization or individual who provides the
765 service. Each page will include a link to this name in the
766 footer. A good way to link to the blog, forum, wiki,
767 corporate portal, or whoever is making the service available.
768 broughtby: text used for the "brought by" link.
769 timezone: default timezone for message display. Users can set their
770 own time zone. Defaults to 'UTC', which is a pretty good default.
771 closed: If set to 'true', will disallow registration on your site.
772 This is a cheap way to restrict accounts to only one
773 individual or group; just register the accounts you want on
774 the service, *then* set this variable to 'true'.
775 inviteonly: If set to 'true', will only allow registration if the user
776 was invited by an existing user.
781 This section is a reference to the configuration options for
782 DB_DataObject (see http://ur1.ca/7xp). The ones that you may want to
783 set are listed below for clarity.
785 database: a DSN (Data Source Name) for your Laconica database. This is
786 in the format 'protocol://username:password@hostname/databasename',
787 where 'protocol' is 'mysql' (or possibly 'postgresql', if you
788 really know what you're doing), 'username' is the username,
789 'password' is the password, and etc.
790 ini_yourdbname: if your database is not named 'laconica', you'll need
791 to set this to point to the location of the
792 laconica.ini file. Note that the real name of your database
793 should go in there, not literally 'yourdbname'.
794 db_driver: You can try changing this to 'MDB2' to use the other driver
795 type for DB_DataObject, but note that it breaks the OpenID
796 libraries, which only support PEAR::DB.
797 debug: On a database error, you may get a message saying to set this
798 value to 5 to see debug messages in the browser. This breaks
799 just about all pages, and will also expose the username and
801 quote_identifiers: Set this to true if you're using postgresql.
802 type: either 'mysql' or 'postgresql' (used for some bits of
803 database-type-specific SQL in the code). Defaults to mysql.
804 mirror: you can set this to an array of DSNs, like the above
805 'database' value. If it's set, certain read-only actions will
806 use a random value out of this array for the database, rather
807 than the one in 'database' (actually, 'database' is overwritten).
808 You can offload a busy DB server by setting up MySQL replication
809 and adding the slaves to this array. Note that if you want some
810 requests to go to the 'database' (master) server, you'll need
811 to include it in this array, too.
816 By default, Laconica sites log error messages to the syslog facility.
817 (You can override this using the 'logfile' parameter described above).
819 appname: The name that Laconica uses to log messages. By default it's
820 "laconica", but if you have more than one installation on the
821 server, you may want to change the name for each instance so
822 you can track log messages more easily.
827 You can configure the software to queue time-consuming tasks, like
828 sending out SMS email or XMPP messages, for off-line processing. See
829 'Queues and daemons' above for how to set this up.
831 enabled: Whether to uses queues. Defaults to false.
836 The default license to use for your users notices. The default is the
837 Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which is probably the right
838 choice for any public site. Note that some other servers will not
839 accept notices if you apply a stricter license than this.
841 url: URL of the license, used for links.
842 title: Title for the license, like 'Creative Commons Attribution 3.0'.
843 image: A button shown on each page for the license.
848 This is for configuring out-going email. We use PEAR's Mail module,
849 see: http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.mail.mail.factory.php
851 backend: the backend to use for mail, one of 'mail', 'sendmail', and
852 'smtp'. Defaults to PEAR's default, 'mail'.
853 params: if the mail backend requires any parameters, you can provide
854 them in an associative array.
859 This is for configuring nicknames in the service.
861 blacklist: an array of strings for usernames that may not be
862 registered. A default array exists for strings that are
863 used by Laconica (e.g. 'doc', 'main', 'avatar', 'theme')
864 but you may want to add others if you have other software
865 installed in a subdirectory of Laconica or if you just
866 don't want certain words used as usernames.
867 featured: an array of nicknames of 'featured' users of the site.
868 Can be useful to draw attention to well-known users, or
869 interesting people, or whatever.
874 For configuring avatar access.
876 server: If set, defines another server where avatars are stored in the
877 root directory. Note that the 'avatar' subdir still has to be
878 writeable. You'd typically use this to split HTTP requests on
879 the client to speed up page loading, either with another
880 virtual server or with an NFS or SAMBA share. Clients
881 typically only make 2 connections to a single server at a
882 time (http://ur1.ca/6ih), so this can parallelize the job.
888 For configuring the public stream.
890 localonly: If set to true, only messages posted by users of this
891 service (rather than other services, filtered through OMB)
892 are shown in the public stream. Default true.
893 blacklist: An array of IDs of users to hide from the public stream.
894 Useful if you have someone making excessive Twitterfeed posts
895 to the site, other kinds of automated posts, testing bots, etc.
900 server: Like avatars, you can speed up page loading by pointing the
901 theme file lookup to another server (virtual or real). The
902 theme server's root path should map to the Laconica "theme"
903 subdirectory. Defaults to NULL.
908 For configuring the XMPP sub-system.
910 enabled: Whether to accept and send messages by XMPP. Default false.
911 server: server part of XMPP ID for update user.
912 port: connection port for clients. Default 5222, which you probably
913 shouldn't need to change.
914 user: username for the client connection. Users will receive messages
915 from 'user'@'server'.
916 resource: a unique identifier for the connection to the server. This
917 is actually used as a prefix for each XMPP component in the system.
918 password: password for the user account.
919 host: some XMPP domains are served by machines with a different
920 hostname. (For example, @gmail.com GTalk users connect to
921 talk.google.com). Set this to the correct hostname if that's the
922 case with your server.
923 encryption: Whether to encrypt the connection between Laconica and the
924 XMPP server. Defaults to true, but you can get
925 considerably better performance turning it off if you're
926 connecting to a server on the same machine or on a
928 debug: if turned on, this will make the XMPP library blurt out all of
929 the incoming and outgoing messages as XML stanzas. Use as a
930 last resort, and never turn it on if you don't have queues
931 enabled, since it will spit out sensitive data to the browser.
932 public: an array of JIDs to send _all_ notices to. This is useful for
933 participating in third-party search and archiving services.
938 Miscellaneous tagging stuff.
940 dropoff: Decay factor for tag listing, in seconds.
941 Defaults to exponential decay over ten days; you can twiddle
942 with it to try and get better results for your site.
947 For daemon processes.
949 piddir: directory that daemon processes should write their PID file
950 (process ID) to. Defaults to /var/run/, which is where this
951 stuff should usually go on Unix-ish systems.
952 user: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective user ID
953 to this user before running. Probably a good idea, especially if
954 you start the daemons as root. Note: user name, like 'daemon',
956 group: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective group ID
957 to this named group. Again, a name, not a numerical ID.
962 You can get a significant boost in performance by caching some
963 database data in memcached (http://www.danga.com/memcached/).
965 enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
966 server: a string with the hostname of the memcached server. Can also
967 be an array of hostnames, if you've got more than one server.
972 You can get a significant boost in performance using Sphinx Search
973 instead of your database server to search for users and notices.
974 (http://sphinxsearch.com/).
976 enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
977 server: a string with the hostname of the sphinx server.
978 port: an integer with the port number of the sphinx server.
983 A catch-all for integration with other systems.
985 source: The name to use for the source of posts to Twitter. Defaults
986 to 'laconica', but if you request your own source name from
987 Twitter (http://twitter.com/help/request_source), you can use
988 that here instead. Status updates on Twitter will then have
996 enabled: A three-valued flag for whether to use notice inboxes (see
997 upgrading info above for notes about this change). Can be
998 'false', 'true', or '"transitional"'.
1003 The primary output for Laconica is syslog, unless you configured a
1004 separate logfile. This is probably the first place to look if you're
1005 getting weird behaviour from Laconica.
1007 If you're tracking the unstable version of Laconica in the darcs
1008 repository (see below), and you get a compilation error ("unexpected
1009 T_STRING") in the browser, check to see that you don't have any
1010 conflicts in your code.
1012 If you upgraded to Laconica 0.6.2 without reading the "Notice inboxes"
1013 section above, and all your users' 'Personal' tabs are empty, read the
1014 "Notice inboxes" section above.
1019 These are some myths you may see on the Web about Laconica.
1020 Documentation from the core team about Laconica has been pretty
1021 sparse, so some backtracking and guesswork resulted in some incorrect
1024 - "Set $config['db']['debug'] = 5 to debug the database." This is an
1025 extremely bad idea. It's a tool built into DB_DataObject that will
1026 emit oodles of print lines directly to the browser of your users.
1027 Among these lines will be your database username and password. Do
1028 not enable this option on a production Web site for any reason.
1030 - "Edit dataobject.ini with the following settings..." dataobject.ini
1031 is a development file for the DB_DataObject framework and is not
1032 used by the running software. It was removed from the Laconica
1033 distribution because its presence was confusing. Do not bother
1034 configuring dataobject.ini, and do not put your database username
1035 and password into the file on a production Web server; unscrupulous
1036 persons may try to read it to get your passwords.
1041 If you're adventurous or impatient, you may want to install the
1042 development version of Laconica. To get it, use the darcs version
1043 control tool (http://darcs.net/) like so:
1045 darcs get http://laconi.ca/darcs/ mublog
1047 To keep it up-to-date, use 'darcs pull'. Watch for conflicts!
1052 There are several ways to get more information about Laconica.
1054 * There is a mailing list for Laconica developers and admins at
1055 http://mail.laconi.ca/mailman/listinfo/laconica-dev
1056 * The #laconica IRC channel on freenode.net (http://www.freenode.net/).
1057 * The Laconica wiki, http://laconi.ca/trac/
1062 * Microblogging messages to http://identi.ca/evan are very welcome.
1063 * Laconica's Trac server has a bug tracker for any defects you may find,
1064 or ideas for making things better. http://laconi.ca/trac/
1065 * e-mail to evan@identi.ca will usually be read and responded to very
1066 quickly, unless the question is really hard.
1071 The following is an incomplete list of developers who've worked on
1072 Laconi.ca. Apologies for any oversight; please let evan@identi.ca know
1073 if anyone's been overlooked in error.
1075 * Evan Prodromou, founder and lead developer, Control Yourself, Inc.
1076 * Zach Copley, Control Yourself, Inc.
1077 * Earle Martin, Control Yourself, Inc.
1078 * Marie-Claude Doyon, designer, Control Yourself, Inc.
1079 * Sarven Capadisli, Control Yourself, Inc.
1080 * Robin Millette, Control Yourself, Inc.
1091 * Ken Sheppardson (Trac server, man-about-town)
1092 * Tiago 'gouki' Faria (entrans)
1093 * Tryggvi Björgvinsson
1095 Thanks also to the developers of our upstream library code and to the
1096 thousands of people who have tried out Identi.ca, installed Laconi.ca,
1097 told their friends, and built the Open Microblogging network to what