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 New features in version 0.6.0 include:
76 * Invitations by email.
77 * Users can mark messages as "favorites" (only Web, not API).
78 * A bridge to push messages on the Laconica instance to an account on
80 * Direct private messages between users on a server (only Web, not API
82 * Restructured off-line daemons.
87 The following software packages are *required* for this software to
90 - PHP 5.2.x. It may be possible to run this software on earlier
91 versions of PHP, but many of the functions used are only available
93 - MySQL 5.x. The Laconica database is stored, by default, in a MySQL
94 server. It has been primarily tested on 5.x servers, although it may
95 be possible to install on earlier (or later!) versions. The server
96 *must* support the MyISAM storage engine -- the default for most
97 MySQL servers -- *and* the InnoDB storage engine.
98 - A Web server. Preferably, you should have Apache 2.2.x with the
99 mod_rewrite extension installed and enabled.
101 Your PHP installation must include the following PHP extensions:
103 - Curl. This is for fetching files by HTTP.
104 - XMLWriter. This is for formatting XML and HTML output.
105 - MySQL. For accessing the database.
106 - GD. For scaling down avatar images.
108 For some functionality, you will also need the following extensions:
110 - Memcache. A client for the memcached server, which caches database
111 information in volatile memory. This is important for adequate
112 performance on high-traffic sites. You will also need a memcached
113 server to store the data in.
114 - Mailparse. Efficient parsing of email requires this extension.
115 Submission by email or SMS-over-email uses this extension.
117 You will almost definitely get 2-3 times better performance from your
118 site if you install a PHP bytecode cache/accelerator. Some well-known
119 examples are: eaccelerator, Turck mmcache, xcache, apc. Zend Optimizer
120 is a proprietary accelerator installed on some hosting sites.
125 A number of external PHP libraries are used to provide basic
126 functionality and optional functionality for your system. For your
127 convenience, they are available in the "extlib" directory of this
128 package, and you do not have to download and install them. However,
129 you may want to keep them up-to-date with the latest upstream version,
130 and the URLs are listed here for your convenience.
132 - DB_DataObject http://pear.php.net/package/DB_DataObject
133 - Validate http://pear.php.net/package/Validate
134 - OpenID from OpenIDEnabled (not the PEAR version!). We decided
135 to use the openidenabled.com version since it's more widely
136 implemented, and seems to be better supported.
137 http://openidenabled.com/php-openid/
138 - PEAR DB. Although this is an older data access system (new
139 packages should probably use PHP DBO), the OpenID libraries
140 depend on PEAR DB so we use it here, too. DB_DataObject can
141 also use PEAR MDB2, which may give you better performance
142 but won't work with OpenID.
143 http://pear.php.net/package/DB
144 - OAuth.php from http://oauth.googlecode.com/svn/code/php/
145 - markdown.php from http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/
146 - PEAR Mail, for sending out mail notifications
147 http://pear.php.net/package/Mail
148 - PEAR Net_SMTP, if you use the SMTP factory for notifications
149 http://pear.php.net/package/Net_SMTP
150 - XMPPHP, the follow-up to Class.Jabber.php. Probably the best XMPP
151 library available for PHP. http://xmpphp.googlecode.com/. Note that
152 as of this writing the version of this library that is available in
153 the extlib directory is *significantly different* from the upstream
154 version (patches have been submitted). Upgrading to the upstream
155 version may render your Laconica site unable to send or receive XMPP
158 A design goal of Laconica is that the basic Web functionality should
159 work on even the most restrictive commercial hosting services.
160 However, additional functionality, such as receiving messages by
161 Jabber/GTalk, require that you be able to run long-running processes
162 on your account. In addition, posting by email or from SMS require
163 that you be able to install a mail filter in your mail server.
168 Installing the basic Laconica Web component is relatively easy,
169 especially if you've previously installed PHP/MySQL packages.
171 1. Unpack the tarball you downloaded on your Web server. Usually a
172 command like this will work:
174 tar zxf laconica-0.6.0.tar.gz
176 ...which will make a laconica-0.6.0 subdirectory in your current
177 directory. (If you don't have shell access on your Web server, you
178 may have to unpack the tarball on your local computer and FTP the
179 files to the server.)
181 2. Move the tarball to a directory of your choosing in your Web root
182 directory. Usually something like this will work:
184 mv laconica-0.6.0 /var/www/mublog
186 This will make your Laconica instance available in the mublog path of
187 your server, like "http://example.net/mublog". "microblog" or
188 "laconica" might also be good path names. If you know how to
189 configure virtual hosts on your web server, you can try setting up
190 "http://micro.example.net/" or the like.
192 3. You should also take this moment to make your avatar subdirectory
193 writeable by the Web server. An insecure way to do this is:
195 chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/avatar
197 On some systems, this will probably work:
199 chgrp www-data /var/www/mublog/avatar
200 chmod g+w /var/www/mublog/avatar
202 If your Web server runs as another user besides "www-data", try
203 that user's default group instead. As a last resort, you can create
204 a new group like "avatar" and add the Web server's user to the group.
206 4. Create a database to hold your microblog data. Something like this
209 mysqladmin -u "username" --password="password" create laconica
211 Note that Laconica must have its own database; you can't share the
212 database with another program. You can name it whatever you want,
215 (If you don't have shell access to your server, you may need to use
216 a tool like PHPAdmin to create a database. Check your hosting
217 service's documentation for how to create a new MySQL database.)
219 5. Run the laconica.sql SQL script in the db subdirectory to create
220 the database tables in the database. A typical system would work
223 mysql -u "username" --password="password" laconica < /var/www/mublog/db/laconica.sql
225 You may want to test by logging into the database and checking that
226 the tables were created. Here's an example:
230 6. Create a new database account that Laconica will use to access the
231 database. If you have shell access, this will probably work from the
234 GRANT SELECT,INSERT,DELETE,UPDATE on laconica.*
235 TO 'lacuser'@'localhost'
236 IDENTIFIED BY 'lacpassword';
238 You should change 'lacuser' and 'lacpassword' to your preferred new
239 username and password. You may want to test logging in as this new
240 user and testing that you can SELECT from some of the tables in the
241 DB (use SHOW TABLES to see which ones are there).
243 7. Copy the config.php.sample in the Laconica directory to config.php.
245 8. Edit config.php to set the basic configuration for your system.
246 (See descriptions below for basic config options.) Note that there
247 are lots of options and if you try to do them all at once, you will
248 have a hard time making sure what's working and what's not. So,
249 stick with the basics at first.
251 9. At this point, you should be able to navigate in a browser to your
252 microblog's main directory and see the "Public Timeline", which
253 will be empty. If not, magic has happened! You can now register a
254 new user, post some notices, edit your profile, etc. However, you
255 may want to wait to do that stuff if you think you can set up
256 "fancy URLs" (see below), since some URLs are stored in the database.
261 By default, Laconica will have big long sloppy URLs that are hard for
262 people to remember or use. For example, a user's home profile might be
265 http://example.org/mublog/index.php?action=showstream&nickname=fred
267 It's possible to configure the software so it looks like this instead:
269 http://example.org/mublog/fred
271 These "fancy URLs" are more readable and memorable for users. To use
272 fancy URLs, you must either have Apache 2.2.x with .htaccess enabled
273 and mod_redirect enabled, -OR- know how to configure "url redirection"
276 1. Copy the htaccess.sample file to .htaccess in your Laconica
277 directory. Note: if you have control of your server's httpd.conf or
278 similar configuration files, it can greatly improve performance to
279 import the .htaccess file into your conf file instead. If you're
280 not sure how to do it, you may save yourself a lot of headache by
281 just leaving the .htaccess file.
283 2. Change the "RewriteBase" in the new .htaccess file to be the URL path
284 to your Laconica installation on your server. Typically this will
285 be the path to your Laconica directory relative to your Web root.
287 3. Add or uncomment or change a line in your config.php file so it says:
289 $config['site']['fancy'] = true;
291 You should now be able to navigate to a "fancy" URL on your server,
294 http://example.net/mublog/main/register
296 If you changed your HTTP server configuration, you may need to restart
299 If you have problems with the .htaccess file on versions of Apache
300 earlier than 2.2.x, try changing the regular expressions in the
301 htaccess.sample file that use "\w" to just use ".".
306 Laconica supports a cheap-and-dirty system for sending update messages
307 to mobile phones and for receiving updates from the mobile. Instead of
308 sending through the SMS network itself, which is costly and requires
309 buy-in from the wireless carriers, it simply piggybacks on the email
310 gateways that many carriers provide to their customers. So, SMS
311 configuration is essentially email configuration.
313 Each user sends to a made-up email address, which they keep a secret.
314 Incoming email that is "From" the user's SMS email address, and "To"
315 the users' secret email address on the site's domain, will be
316 converted to a message and stored in the DB.
318 For this to work, there *must* be a domain or sub-domain for which all
319 (or most) incoming email can pass through the incoming mail filter.
321 1. Run the SQL script carrier.sql in your Laconica database. This will
324 mysql -u "lacuser" --password="lacpassword" laconica < db/carrier.sql
326 This will populate your database with a list of wireless carriers
327 that support email SMS gateways.
329 2. Make sure the maildaemon.php file is executable:
331 chmod +x scripts/maildaemon.php
333 Note that "daemon" is kind of a misnomer here; the script is more
334 of a filter than a daemon.
336 2. Edit /etc/aliases on your mail server and add the following line:
338 *: /path/to/laconica/scripts/maildaemon.php
340 3. Run whatever code you need to to update your aliases database. For
341 many mail servers (Postfix, Exim, Sendmail), this should work:
345 You may need to restart your mail server for the new database to
348 4. Set the following in your config.php file:
350 $config['mail']['domain'] = 'yourdomain.example.net';
352 At this point, post-by-email and post-by-SMS-gateway should work. Note
353 that if your mail server is on a different computer from your email
354 server, you'll need to have a full installation of Laconica, a working
355 config.php, and access to the Laconica database from the mail server.
360 XMPP (eXtended Message and Presence Protocol, http://xmpp.org/) is the
361 instant-messenger protocol that drives Jabber and GTalk IM. You can
362 distribute messages via XMPP using the system below; however, you
363 need to run the XMPP incoming daemon to allow incoming messages as
366 1. You may want to strongly consider setting up your own XMPP server.
367 Ejabberd, OpenFire, and JabberD are all Open Source servers.
368 Jabber, Inc. provides a high-performance commercial server.
370 2. You must register a Jabber ID (JID) with your new server. It helps
371 to choose a name like "update@example.com" or "notice" or something
372 similar. Alternately, your "update JID" can be registered on a
373 publicly-available XMPP service, like jabber.org or GTalk.
375 Laconica will not register the JID with your chosen XMPP server;
376 you need to do this manually, with an XMPP client like Gajim,
377 Telepathy, or Pidgin.im.
379 3. Configure your site's XMPP variables, as described below in the
380 configuration section.
382 On a default installation, your site can broadcast messages using
383 XMPP. Users won't be able to post messages using XMPP unless you've
384 got the XMPP daemon running. See 'Queues and daemons' below for how
385 to set that up. Also, once you have a sizable number of users, sending
386 a lot of SMS, OMB, and XMPP messages whenever someone posts a message
387 can really slow down your site; it may cause posting to timeout.
392 You can send *all* messages from your microblogging site to a
393 third-party service using XMPP. This can be useful for providing
394 search, indexing, bridging, or other cool services.
396 To configure a downstream site to receive your public stream, add
397 their "JID" (Jabber ID) to your config.php as follows:
399 $config['xmpp']['public'][] = 'downstream@example.net';
401 (Don't miss those square brackets at the end.) Note that your XMPP
402 broadcasting must be configured as mentioned above. Although you can
403 send out messages at "Web time", high-volume sites should strongly
404 consider setting up queues and daemons.
409 Some activities that Laconica needs to do, like broadcast OMB, SMS,
410 and XMPP messages, can be 'queued' and done by off-line bots instead.
411 For this to work, you must be able to run long-running offline
412 processes, either on your main Web server or on another server you
413 control. (Your other server will still need all the above
414 prerequisites, with the exception of Apache.) Installing on a separate
415 server is probably a good idea for high-volume sites.
417 1. You'll need the "CLI" (command-line interface) version of PHP
418 installed on whatever server you use.
420 2. If you're using a separate server for queues, install Laconica
421 somewhere on the server. You don't need to worry about the
422 .htaccess file, but make sure that your config.php file is close
423 to, or identical to, your Web server's version.
425 3. In your config.php files (both the Web server and the queues
426 server!), set the following variable:
428 $config['queue']['enabled'] = true;
430 4. On the queues server, run the command scripts/startdaemons.sh. It
431 needs as a parameter the install path; if you run it from the
432 Laconica dir, "." should suffice.
434 This will run six (for now) queue handlers:
436 * xmppdaemon.php - listens for new XMPP messages from users and stores
437 them as notices in the database.
438 * jabberqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
439 registered users who should receive them.
440 * publicqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
441 public feed listeners.
442 * ombqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to OpenMicroBlogging
443 recipients on foreign servers.
444 * smsqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to SMS-over-email addresses
446 * xmppconfirmhandler.php - sends confirmation messages to registered
449 Note that these queue daemons are pretty raw, and need your care. In
450 particular, they leak memory, and you may want to restart them on a
451 regular (daily or so) basis with a cron job. Also, if they lose
452 the connection to the XMPP server for too long, they'll simply die. It
453 may be a good idea to use a daemon-monitoring service, like 'monit',
454 to check their status and keep them running.
456 All the daemons write their process IDs (pids) to /var/run/ by
457 default. This can be useful for starting, stopping, and monitoring the
463 Sitemap files (http://sitemaps.org/) are a very nice way of telling
464 search engines and other interested bots what's available on your site
465 and what's changed recently. You can generate sitemap files for your
468 1. Choose your sitemap URL layout. Laconica creates a number of
469 sitemap XML files for different parts of your site. You may want to
470 put these in a sub-directory of your Laconica directory to avoid
471 clutter. The sitemap index file tells the search engines and other
472 bots where to find all the sitemap files; it *must* be in the main
473 installation directory or higher. Both types of file must be
474 available through HTTP.
476 2. To generate your sitemaps, run the following command on your server:
478 php scripts/sitemap.php -f index-file-path -d sitemap-directory -u URL-prefix-for-sitemaps
480 Here, index-file-path is the full path to the sitemap index file,
481 like './sitemapindex.xml'. sitemap-directory is the directory where
482 you want the sitemaps stored, like './sitemaps/' (make sure the dir
483 exists). URL-prefix-for-sitemaps is the full URL for the sitemap dir,
484 typically something like 'http://example.net/mublog/sitemaps/'.
486 You can use several methods for submitting your sitemap index to
487 search engines to get your site indexed. One is to add a line like the
488 following to your robots.txt file:
490 Sitemap: /mublog/sitemapindex.xml
492 This is a good idea for letting *all* Web spiders know about your
493 sitemap. You can also submit sitemap files to major search engines
494 using their respective "Webmaster centres"; see sitemaps.org for links
500 There are two themes shipped with this version of Laconica: "stoica",
501 which is what the Identi.ca site uses, and "default", which is a good
502 basis for other sites.
504 As of right now, your ability to change the theme is site-wide; users
505 can't choose their own theme. Additionally, the only thing you can
506 change in the theme is CSS stylesheets and some image files; you can't
507 change the HTML output, like adding or removing menu items.
509 You can choose a theme using the $config['site']['theme'] element in
510 the config.php file. See below for details.
512 You can add your own theme by making a sub-directory of the 'theme'
513 subdirectory with the name of your theme. Each theme can have the
516 display.css: a CSS2 file for "default" styling for all browsers.
517 ie6.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
519 ie7.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
521 logo.png: a logo image for the site.
522 default-avatar-profile.png: a 96x96 pixel image to use as the avatar for
523 users who don't upload their own.
524 default-avatar-stream.png: Ditto, but 48x48. For streams of notices.
525 default-avatar-mini.png: Ditto ditto, but 24x24. For subscriptions
526 listing on profile pages.
528 You may want to start by copying the files from the default theme to
534 Translations in Laconica use the gettext system (http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/).
535 Theoretically, you can add your own sub-directory to the locale/
536 subdirectory to add a new language to your system. You'll need to
537 compile the ".po" files into ".mo" files, however.
542 If you've been using Laconica 0.5 or lower, or if you've been tracking
543 the "darcs" version of the software, you will probably want to upgrade
544 and keep your existing data. There is no automated upgrade procedure
545 in Laconica 0.6. Try these step-by-step instructions; read to the end
546 first before trying them.
548 0. Download Laconica and set up all the prerequisites as if you were
550 1. Make backups of both your database and your Web directory. UNDER NO
551 CIRCUMSTANCES should you try to do an upgrade without a known-good
552 backup. You have been warned.
553 2. Shut down Web access to your site, either by turning off your Web
554 server or by redirecting all pages to a "sorry, under maintenance"
556 3. Shut down XMPP access to your site, typically by shutting down the
557 xmppdaemon.php process and all other daemons that you're running.
558 If you've got "monit" or "cron" automatically restarting your
559 daemons, make sure to turn that off, too.
560 4. Shut down SMS and email access to your site. The easy way to do
561 this is to comment out the line piping incoming email to your
562 maildaemon.php file, and running something like "newaliases".
563 5. Once all writing processes to your site are turned off, make a
564 final backup of the Web directory and database.
565 6. Move your Laconica directory to a backup spot, like "mublog.bak".
566 7. Unpack your Laconica 0.6 tarball and move it to "mublog" or
567 wherever your code used to be.
568 8. Copy the config.php file and avatar directory from your old
569 directory to your new directory.
570 9. Copy htaccess.sample to .htaccess in the new directory. Change the
571 RewriteBase to use the correct path.
572 10. Rebuild the database. Go to your Laconica directory and run the
573 rebuilddb.sh script like this:
575 ./scripts/rebuilddb.sh rootuser rootpassword database db/laconica.sql
577 Here, rootuser and rootpassword are the username and password for a
578 user who can drop and create databases as well as tables; typically
579 that's _not_ the user Laconica runs as.
580 11. Use mysql client to log into your database and make sure that the
581 notice, user, profile, subscription etc. tables are non-empty.
582 12. Turn back on the Web server, and check that things still work.
583 13. Turn back on XMPP bots and email maildaemon. Note that the XMPP
584 bots have changed since version 0.5; see above for details.
586 If you're upgrading from very old versions, you may want to look at
587 the fixup_* scripts in the scripts directories. These will store some
588 precooked data in the DB.
590 Configuration options
591 =====================
593 The sole configuration file for Laconica (excepting configurations for
594 dependency software) is config.php in your Laconica directory. If you
595 edit any other file in the directory, like lib/common.php (where most
596 of the defaults are defined), you will lose your configuration options
597 in any upgrade, and you will wish that you had been more careful.
599 Almost all configuration options are made through a two-dimensional
600 associative array, cleverly named $config. A typical configuration
603 $config['section']['option'] = value;
605 For brevity, the following documentation describes each section and
611 This section is a catch-all for site-wide variables.
613 name: the name of your site, like 'YourCompany Microblog'.
614 server: the server part of your site's URLs, like 'example.net'.
615 path: The path part of your site's URLs, like 'mublog' or '/'
617 fancy: whether or not your site uses fancy URLs (see Fancy URLs
618 section above). Default is false.
619 logfile: full path to a file for Laconica to save logging
620 information to. You may want to use this if you don't have
622 locale_path: full path to the directory for locale data. Unless you
623 store all your locale data in one place, you probably
624 don't need to use this.
625 language: default language for your site. Defaults to US English.
626 languages: A list of languages supported on your site. Typically you'd
627 only change this if you wanted to disable support for one
629 "unset($config['site']['languages']['de'])" will disable
631 theme: Theme for your site (see Theme section). Two themes are
632 provided by default: 'default' and 'stoica' (the one used by
633 Identi.ca). It's appreciated if you don't use the 'stoica' theme
634 except as the basis for your own.
635 email: contact email address for your site. By default, it's extracted
636 from your Web server environment; you may want to customize it.
637 broughtbyurl: name of an organization or individual who provides the
638 service. Each page will include a link to this name in the
639 footer. A good way to link to the blog, forum, wiki,
640 corporate portal, or whoever is making the service available.
641 broughtby: text used for the "brought by" link.
642 timezone: default timezone for message display. Users can set their
643 own time zone. Defaults to 'UTC', which is a pretty good default.
644 closed: If set to 'true', will disallow registration on your site.
645 This is a cheap way to restrict accounts to only one
646 individual or group; just register the accounts you want on
647 the service, *then* set this variable to 'true'.
652 By default, Laconica sites log error messages to the syslog facility.
653 (You can override this using the 'logfile' parameter described above).
655 appname: The name that Laconica uses to log messages. By default it's
656 "laconica", but if you have more than one installation on the
657 server, you may want to change the name for each instance so
658 you can track log messages more easily.
663 You can configure the software to queue time-consuming tasks, like
664 sending out SMS email or XMPP messages, for off-line processing. See
665 'Queues and daemons' above for how to set this up.
667 enabled: Whether to uses queues. Defaults to false.
672 The default license to use for your users notices. The default is the
673 Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which is probably the right
674 choice for any public site. Note that some other servers will not
675 accept notices if you apply a stricter license than this.
677 url: URL of the license, used for links.
678 title: Title for the license, like 'Creative Commons Attribution 3.0'.
679 image: A button shown on each page for the license.
684 This is for configuring out-going email. We use PEAR's Mail module,
685 see: http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.mail.mail.factory.php
687 backend: the backend to use for mail, one of 'mail', 'sendmail', and
688 'smtp'. Defaults to PEAR's default, 'mail'.
689 params: if the mail backend requires any parameters, you can provide
690 them in an associative array.
695 This is for configuring nicknames in the service.
697 blacklist: an array of strings for usernames that may not be
698 registered. A default array exists for strings that are
699 used by Laconica (e.g. 'doc', 'main', 'avatar', 'theme')
700 but you may want to add others if you have other software
701 installed in a subdirectory of Laconica or if you just
702 don't want certain words used as usernames.
707 For configuring avatar access.
709 server: If set, defines another server where avatars are stored in the
710 root directory. Note that the 'avatar' subdir still has to be
711 writeable. You'd typically use this to split HTTP requests on
712 the client to speed up page loading, either with another
713 virtual server or with an NFS or SAMBA share. Clients
714 typically only make 2 connections to a single server at a
715 time (http://ur1.ca/6ih), so this can parallelize the job.
721 For configuring the public stream.
723 localonly: If set to true, only messages posted by users of this
724 service (rather than other services, filtered through OMB)
725 are shown in the public stream. Default true.
730 server: Like avatars, you can speed up page loading by pointing the
731 theme file lookup to another server (virtual or real). The
732 theme server's root path should map to the Laconica "theme"
733 subdirectory. Defaults to NULL.
738 For configuring the XMPP sub-system.
740 enabled: Whether to accept and send messages by XMPP. Default false.
741 server: server part of XMPP ID for update user.
742 port: connection port for clients. Default 5222, which you probably
743 shouldn't need to change.
744 user: username for the client connection. Users will receive messages
745 from 'user'@'server'.
746 resource: a unique identifier for the connection to the server. This
747 is actually used as a prefix for each XMPP component in the system.
748 password: password for the user account.
749 host: some XMPP domains are served by machines with a different
750 hostname. (For example, @gmail.com GTalk users connect to
751 talk.google.com). Set this to the correct hostname if that's the
752 case with your server.
753 encryption: Whether to encrypt the connection between Laconica and the
754 XMPP server. Defaults to true, but you can get
755 considerably better performance turning it off if you're
756 connecting to a server on the same machine or on a
758 debug: if turned on, this will make the XMPP library blurt out all of
759 the incoming and outgoing messages as XML stanzas. Use as a
760 last resort, and never turn it on if you don't have queues
761 enabled, since it will spit out sensitive data to the browser.
762 public: an array of JIDs to send _all_ notices to. This is useful for
763 participating in third-party search and archiving services.
768 Miscellaneous tagging stuff.
770 dropoff: Decay factor for tag listing, in seconds.
771 Defaults to exponential decay over ten days; you can twiddle
772 with it to try and get better results for your site.
777 For daemon processes.
779 piddir: directory that daemon processes should write their PID file
780 (process ID) to. Defaults to /var/run/, which is where this
781 stuff should usually go on Unix-ish systems.
782 user: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective user ID
783 to this user before running. Probably a good idea, especially if
784 you start the daemons as root. Note: user name, like 'daemon',
786 group: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective group ID
787 to this named group. Again, a name, not a numerical ID.
792 The primary output for Laconica is syslog, unless you configured a
793 separate logfile. This is probably the first place to look if you're
794 getting weird behaviour from Laconica.
796 If you're tracking the unstable version of Laconica in the darcs
797 repository (see below), and you get a compilation error ("unexpected
798 T_STRING") in the browser, check to see that you don't have any
799 conflicts in your code.
804 These are some myths you may see on the Web about Laconica.
805 Documentation from the core team about Laconica has been pretty
806 sparse, so some backtracking and guesswork resulted in some incorrect
809 - "Set $config['db']['debug'] = 5 to debug the database." This is an
810 extremely bad idea. It's a tool built into DB_DataObject that will
811 emit oodles of print lines directly to the browser of your users.
812 Among these lines will be your database username and password. Do
813 not enable this option on a production Web site for any reason.
815 - "Edit dataobject.ini with the following settings..." dataobject.ini
816 is a development file for the DB_DataObject framework and is not
817 used by the running software. It was removed from the Laconica
818 distribution because its presence was confusing. Do not bother
819 configuring dataobject.ini, and do not put your database username
820 and password into the file on a production Web server; unscrupulous
821 persons may try to read it to get your passwords.
826 If you're adventurous or impatient, you may want to install the
827 development version of Laconica. To get it, use the darcs version
828 control tool (http://darcs.net/) like so:
830 darcs get http://laconi.ca/darcs/ mublog
832 To keep it up-to-date, use 'darcs pull'. Watch for conflicts!
837 There are several ways to get more information about Laconica.
839 * There is a mailing list for Laconica developers and admins at
840 http://mail.laconi.ca/mailman/listinfo/laconica-dev
841 * The #laconica IRC channel on freenode.net (http://www.freenode.net/).
842 * The Laconica wiki, http://laconi.ca/trac/
847 * Microblogging messages to http://identi.ca/evan are very welcome.
848 * Laconica's Trac server has a bug tracker for any defects you may find,
849 or ideas for making things better. http://laconi.ca/trac/
850 * e-mail to evan@identi.ca will usually be read and responded to very
851 quickly, unless the question is really hard.
856 The following is an incomplete list of developers who've worked on
857 Laconi.ca. Apologies for any oversight; please let evan@identi.ca know
858 if anyone's been overlooked in error.
860 * Evan Prodromou, founder and lead developer, Control Yourself, Inc.
861 * Zach Copley, Control Yourself, Inc.
862 * Earle Martin, Control Yourself, Inc.
863 * Marie-Claude Doyon, designer, Control Yourself, Inc.
874 * Ken Sheppardson (Trac server, man-about-town)
875 * Tiago 'gouki' Faria (entrans)
877 Thanks also to the thousands of people who have tried out Identi.ca,
878 installed Laconi.ca, told their friends, and built the Open
879 Microblogging network to what it is today.