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 0.6.1 (release 6 Oct 2008). Notable features of version 0.6.2 include:
77 - Notice inboxes have been added. This is a big database change
78 that will allow a more robust messaging model in the future; for
79 now, it is an optimization that speeds up some queries.
80 - Posted URLs are automatically shortened; users can choose their
81 preferred url shortening service.
82 - Support SUP protocol
83 (http://code.google.com/p/simpleupdateprotocol/) for quicker updates
84 to FriendFeed (http://friendfeed.com/).
85 - Tag streams now have an RSS feed.
86 - CSRF protection for posting notices and logging in. This closes
87 the "Version 0 API" used initially for identi.ca and supported
88 until September 30, 2008.
89 - Slightly broadened the layout of default and Identi.ca themes to
90 accommodate more verbose (non-English!) languages' interfaces.
91 - Replies made through the Web site will refer to the clicked-on
93 - enjit queue handler.
94 - Experimental theme for iphone use.
95 - Various internationalization scripts and updates.
96 - Better UTF-8 escaped entity handling in API.
97 - Better handling of since_id and before_id parameters in API.
98 - Better heuristics for when to include a closing parenthesis in a link.
99 - Handle multi-byte-encoded @-replies from XMPP through Twitter bridge.
100 - Better handling of read-only requests in API, to allow using
101 replicated mirror servers.
102 - A lot of common code factored out of default and identi.ca themes;
103 default theme now much more functional.
104 - 'Invite-only' mode for closed sites.
105 - Some undocumented features in Twitter API user/show.
106 - Favorites flag in API for statuses.
108 Because of the CSRF fixes in particular, this upgrade is recommended
109 for all Laconica sites.
114 The following software packages are *required* for this software to
117 - PHP 5.2.x. It may be possible to run this software on earlier
118 versions of PHP, but many of the functions used are only available
120 - MySQL 5.x. The Laconica database is stored, by default, in a MySQL
121 server. It has been primarily tested on 5.x servers, although it may
122 be possible to install on earlier (or later!) versions. The server
123 *must* support the MyISAM storage engine -- the default for most
124 MySQL servers -- *and* the InnoDB storage engine.
125 - A Web server. Preferably, you should have Apache 2.2.x with the
126 mod_rewrite extension installed and enabled.
128 Your PHP installation must include the following PHP extensions:
130 - Curl. This is for fetching files by HTTP.
131 - XMLWriter. This is for formatting XML and HTML output.
132 - MySQL. For accessing the database.
133 - GD. For scaling down avatar images.
134 - mbstring. For handling Unicode (UTF-8) encoded strings.
136 For some functionality, you will also need the following extensions:
138 - Memcache. A client for the memcached server, which caches database
139 information in volatile memory. This is important for adequate
140 performance on high-traffic sites. You will also need a memcached
141 server to store the data in.
142 - Mailparse. Efficient parsing of email requires this extension.
143 Submission by email or SMS-over-email uses this extension.
144 - Sphinx Search. A client for the sphinx server, an alternative
145 to MySQL or Postgresql fulltext search. You will also need a
146 Sphinx server to serve the search queries.
149 You will almost definitely get 2-3 times better performance from your
150 site if you install a PHP bytecode cache/accelerator. Some well-known
151 examples are: eaccelerator, Turck mmcache, xcache, apc. Zend Optimizer
152 is a proprietary accelerator installed on some hosting sites.
157 A number of external PHP libraries are used to provide basic
158 functionality and optional functionality for your system. For your
159 convenience, they are available in the "extlib" directory of this
160 package, and you do not have to download and install them. However,
161 you may want to keep them up-to-date with the latest upstream version,
162 and the URLs are listed here for your convenience.
164 - DB_DataObject http://pear.php.net/package/DB_DataObject
165 - Validate http://pear.php.net/package/Validate
166 - OpenID from OpenIDEnabled (not the PEAR version!). We decided
167 to use the openidenabled.com version since it's more widely
168 implemented, and seems to be better supported.
169 http://openidenabled.com/php-openid/
170 - PEAR DB. Although this is an older data access system (new
171 packages should probably use PHP DBO), the OpenID libraries
172 depend on PEAR DB so we use it here, too. DB_DataObject can
173 also use PEAR MDB2, which may give you better performance
174 but won't work with OpenID.
175 http://pear.php.net/package/DB
176 - OAuth.php from http://oauth.googlecode.com/svn/code/php/
177 - markdown.php from http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/
178 - PEAR Mail, for sending out mail notifications
179 http://pear.php.net/package/Mail
180 - PEAR Net_SMTP, if you use the SMTP factory for notifications
181 http://pear.php.net/package/Net_SMTP
182 - PEAR Net_Socket, if you use the SMTP factory for notifications
183 http://pear.php.net/package/Net_Socket
184 - XMPPHP, the follow-up to Class.Jabber.php. Probably the best XMPP
185 library available for PHP. http://xmpphp.googlecode.com/. Note that
186 as of this writing the version of this library that is available in
187 the extlib directory is *significantly different* from the upstream
188 version (patches have been submitted). Upgrading to the upstream
189 version may render your Laconica site unable to send or receive XMPP
192 A design goal of Laconica is that the basic Web functionality should
193 work on even the most restrictive commercial hosting services.
194 However, additional functionality, such as receiving messages by
195 Jabber/GTalk, require that you be able to run long-running processes
196 on your account. In addition, posting by email or from SMS require
197 that you be able to install a mail filter in your mail server.
202 Installing the basic Laconica Web component is relatively easy,
203 especially if you've previously installed PHP/MySQL packages.
205 1. Unpack the tarball you downloaded on your Web server. Usually a
206 command like this will work:
208 tar zxf laconica-0.6.2.tar.gz
210 ...which will make a laconica-0.6.2 subdirectory in your current
211 directory. (If you don't have shell access on your Web server, you
212 may have to unpack the tarball on your local computer and FTP the
213 files to the server.)
215 2. Move the tarball to a directory of your choosing in your Web root
216 directory. Usually something like this will work:
218 mv laconica-0.6.2 /var/www/mublog
220 This will make your Laconica instance available in the mublog path of
221 your server, like "http://example.net/mublog". "microblog" or
222 "laconica" might also be good path names. If you know how to
223 configure virtual hosts on your web server, you can try setting up
224 "http://micro.example.net/" or the like.
226 3. You should also take this moment to make your avatar subdirectory
227 writeable by the Web server. An insecure way to do this is:
229 chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/avatar
231 On some systems, this will probably work:
233 chgrp www-data /var/www/mublog/avatar
234 chmod g+w /var/www/mublog/avatar
236 If your Web server runs as another user besides "www-data", try
237 that user's default group instead. As a last resort, you can create
238 a new group like "avatar" and add the Web server's user to the group.
240 4. Create a database to hold your microblog data. Something like this
243 mysqladmin -u "username" --password="password" create laconica
245 Note that Laconica must have its own database; you can't share the
246 database with another program. You can name it whatever you want,
249 (If you don't have shell access to your server, you may need to use
250 a tool like PHPAdmin to create a database. Check your hosting
251 service's documentation for how to create a new MySQL database.)
253 5. Run the laconica.sql SQL script in the db subdirectory to create
254 the database tables in the database. A typical system would work
257 mysql -u "username" --password="password" laconica < /var/www/mublog/db/laconica.sql
259 You may want to test by logging into the database and checking that
260 the tables were created. Here's an example:
264 6. Create a new database account that Laconica will use to access the
265 database. If you have shell access, this will probably work from the
268 GRANT SELECT,INSERT,DELETE,UPDATE on laconica.*
269 TO 'lacuser'@'localhost'
270 IDENTIFIED BY 'lacpassword';
272 You should change 'lacuser' and 'lacpassword' to your preferred new
273 username and password. You may want to test logging in as this new
274 user and testing that you can SELECT from some of the tables in the
275 DB (use SHOW TABLES to see which ones are there).
277 7. Copy the config.php.sample in the Laconica directory to config.php.
279 8. Edit config.php to set the basic configuration for your system.
280 (See descriptions below for basic config options.) Note that there
281 are lots of options and if you try to do them all at once, you will
282 have a hard time making sure what's working and what's not. So,
283 stick with the basics at first. In particular, customizing the
284 'site' and 'db' settings will almost definitely be needed.
286 9. At this point, you should be able to navigate in a browser to your
287 microblog's main directory and see the "Public Timeline", which
288 will be empty. If not, magic has happened! You can now register a
289 new user, post some notices, edit your profile, etc. However, you
290 may want to wait to do that stuff if you think you can set up
291 "fancy URLs" (see below), since some URLs are stored in the database.
296 By default, Laconica will have big long sloppy URLs that are hard for
297 people to remember or use. For example, a user's home profile might be
300 http://example.org/mublog/index.php?action=showstream&nickname=fred
302 It's possible to configure the software so it looks like this instead:
304 http://example.org/mublog/fred
306 These "fancy URLs" are more readable and memorable for users. To use
307 fancy URLs, you must either have Apache 2.2.x with .htaccess enabled
308 and mod_redirect enabled, -OR- know how to configure "url redirection"
311 1. Copy the htaccess.sample file to .htaccess in your Laconica
312 directory. Note: if you have control of your server's httpd.conf or
313 similar configuration files, it can greatly improve performance to
314 import the .htaccess file into your conf file instead. If you're
315 not sure how to do it, you may save yourself a lot of headache by
316 just leaving the .htaccess file.
318 2. Change the "RewriteBase" in the new .htaccess file to be the URL path
319 to your Laconica installation on your server. Typically this will
320 be the path to your Laconica directory relative to your Web root.
322 3. Add or uncomment or change a line in your config.php file so it says:
324 $config['site']['fancy'] = true;
326 You should now be able to navigate to a "fancy" URL on your server,
329 http://example.net/mublog/main/register
331 If you changed your HTTP server configuration, you may need to restart
334 If you have problems with the .htaccess file on versions of Apache
335 earlier than 2.2.x, try changing the regular expressions in the
336 htaccess.sample file that use "\w" to just use ".".
341 Laconica supports a cheap-and-dirty system for sending update messages
342 to mobile phones and for receiving updates from the mobile. Instead of
343 sending through the SMS network itself, which is costly and requires
344 buy-in from the wireless carriers, it simply piggybacks on the email
345 gateways that many carriers provide to their customers. So, SMS
346 configuration is essentially email configuration.
348 Each user sends to a made-up email address, which they keep a secret.
349 Incoming email that is "From" the user's SMS email address, and "To"
350 the users' secret email address on the site's domain, will be
351 converted to a message and stored in the DB.
353 For this to work, there *must* be a domain or sub-domain for which all
354 (or most) incoming email can pass through the incoming mail filter.
356 1. Run the SQL script carrier.sql in your Laconica database. This will
359 mysql -u "lacuser" --password="lacpassword" laconica < db/carrier.sql
361 This will populate your database with a list of wireless carriers
362 that support email SMS gateways.
364 2. Make sure the maildaemon.php file is executable:
366 chmod +x scripts/maildaemon.php
368 Note that "daemon" is kind of a misnomer here; the script is more
369 of a filter than a daemon.
371 2. Edit /etc/aliases on your mail server and add the following line:
373 *: /path/to/laconica/scripts/maildaemon.php
375 3. Run whatever code you need to to update your aliases database. For
376 many mail servers (Postfix, Exim, Sendmail), this should work:
380 You may need to restart your mail server for the new database to
383 4. Set the following in your config.php file:
385 $config['mail']['domain'] = 'yourdomain.example.net';
387 At this point, post-by-email and post-by-SMS-gateway should work. Note
388 that if your mail server is on a different computer from your email
389 server, you'll need to have a full installation of Laconica, a working
390 config.php, and access to the Laconica database from the mail server.
395 XMPP (eXtended Message and Presence Protocol, http://xmpp.org/) is the
396 instant-messenger protocol that drives Jabber and GTalk IM. You can
397 distribute messages via XMPP using the system below; however, you
398 need to run the XMPP incoming daemon to allow incoming messages as
401 1. You may want to strongly consider setting up your own XMPP server.
402 Ejabberd, OpenFire, and JabberD are all Open Source servers.
403 Jabber, Inc. provides a high-performance commercial server.
405 2. You must register a Jabber ID (JID) with your new server. It helps
406 to choose a name like "update@example.com" or "notice" or something
407 similar. Alternately, your "update JID" can be registered on a
408 publicly-available XMPP service, like jabber.org or GTalk.
410 Laconica will not register the JID with your chosen XMPP server;
411 you need to do this manually, with an XMPP client like Gajim,
412 Telepathy, or Pidgin.im.
414 3. Configure your site's XMPP variables, as described below in the
415 configuration section.
417 On a default installation, your site can broadcast messages using
418 XMPP. Users won't be able to post messages using XMPP unless you've
419 got the XMPP daemon running. See 'Queues and daemons' below for how
420 to set that up. Also, once you have a sizable number of users, sending
421 a lot of SMS, OMB, and XMPP messages whenever someone posts a message
422 can really slow down your site; it may cause posting to timeout.
424 NOTE: stream_select(), a crucial function for network programming, is
425 broken on PHP 5.2.x less than 5.2.6 on amd64-based servers. We don't
426 work around this bug in Laconica; current recommendation is to move
427 off of amd64 to another server.
432 You can send *all* messages from your microblogging site to a
433 third-party service using XMPP. This can be useful for providing
434 search, indexing, bridging, or other cool services.
436 To configure a downstream site to receive your public stream, add
437 their "JID" (Jabber ID) to your config.php as follows:
439 $config['xmpp']['public'][] = 'downstream@example.net';
441 (Don't miss those square brackets at the end.) Note that your XMPP
442 broadcasting must be configured as mentioned above. Although you can
443 send out messages at "Web time", high-volume sites should strongly
444 consider setting up queues and daemons.
449 Some activities that Laconica needs to do, like broadcast OMB, SMS,
450 and XMPP messages, can be 'queued' and done by off-line bots instead.
451 For this to work, you must be able to run long-running offline
452 processes, either on your main Web server or on another server you
453 control. (Your other server will still need all the above
454 prerequisites, with the exception of Apache.) Installing on a separate
455 server is probably a good idea for high-volume sites.
457 1. You'll need the "CLI" (command-line interface) version of PHP
458 installed on whatever server you use.
460 2. If you're using a separate server for queues, install Laconica
461 somewhere on the server. You don't need to worry about the
462 .htaccess file, but make sure that your config.php file is close
463 to, or identical to, your Web server's version.
465 3. In your config.php files (both the Web server and the queues
466 server!), set the following variable:
468 $config['queue']['enabled'] = true;
470 You may also want to look at the 'daemon' section of this file for
471 more daemon options. Note that if you set the 'user' and/or 'group'
472 options, you'll need to create that user and/or group by hand.
473 They're not created automatically.
475 4. On the queues server, run the command scripts/startdaemons.sh. It
476 needs as a parameter the install path; if you run it from the
477 Laconica dir, "." should suffice.
479 This will run six (for now) queue handlers:
481 * xmppdaemon.php - listens for new XMPP messages from users and stores
482 them as notices in the database.
483 * jabberqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
484 registered users who should receive them.
485 * publicqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
486 public feed listeners.
487 * ombqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to OpenMicroBlogging
488 recipients on foreign servers.
489 * smsqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to SMS-over-email addresses
491 * xmppconfirmhandler.php - sends confirmation messages to registered
494 Note that these queue daemons are pretty raw, and need your care. In
495 particular, they leak memory, and you may want to restart them on a
496 regular (daily or so) basis with a cron job. Also, if they lose
497 the connection to the XMPP server for too long, they'll simply die. It
498 may be a good idea to use a daemon-monitoring service, like 'monit',
499 to check their status and keep them running.
501 All the daemons write their process IDs (pids) to /var/run/ by
502 default. This can be useful for starting, stopping, and monitoring the
505 Twitter Friends Syncing
506 -----------------------
508 As of Laconica 0.6.3, users may set a flag in their settings ("Subscribe
509 to my Twitter friends here" under the Twitter tab) to have Laconica
510 attempt to locate and subscribe to "friends" (people they "follow") on
511 Twitter who also have accounts on your Laconica system, and who have
512 previously set up a link for automatically posting notices to Twitter.
514 Optionally, there is a script (./scripts/synctwitterfriends.php), meant
515 to be run periodically from a job scheduler (e.g.: cron under Unix), to
516 look for new additions to users' friends lists. Note that the friends
517 syncing only subscribes users to each other, it does not unsubscribe
518 users when they stop following each other on Twitter.
522 # Update Twitter friends subscriptions every half hour
523 0,30 * * * * /path/to/php /path/to/laconica/scripts/synctwitterfriends.php>&/dev/null
528 Sitemap files (http://sitemaps.org/) are a very nice way of telling
529 search engines and other interested bots what's available on your site
530 and what's changed recently. You can generate sitemap files for your
533 1. Choose your sitemap URL layout. Laconica creates a number of
534 sitemap XML files for different parts of your site. You may want to
535 put these in a sub-directory of your Laconica directory to avoid
536 clutter. The sitemap index file tells the search engines and other
537 bots where to find all the sitemap files; it *must* be in the main
538 installation directory or higher. Both types of file must be
539 available through HTTP.
541 2. To generate your sitemaps, run the following command on your server:
543 php scripts/sitemap.php -f index-file-path -d sitemap-directory -u URL-prefix-for-sitemaps
545 Here, index-file-path is the full path to the sitemap index file,
546 like './sitemapindex.xml'. sitemap-directory is the directory where
547 you want the sitemaps stored, like './sitemaps/' (make sure the dir
548 exists). URL-prefix-for-sitemaps is the full URL for the sitemap dir,
549 typically something like 'http://example.net/mublog/sitemaps/'.
551 You can use several methods for submitting your sitemap index to
552 search engines to get your site indexed. One is to add a line like the
553 following to your robots.txt file:
555 Sitemap: /mublog/sitemapindex.xml
557 This is a good idea for letting *all* Web spiders know about your
558 sitemap. You can also submit sitemap files to major search engines
559 using their respective "Webmaster centres"; see sitemaps.org for links
565 There are two themes shipped with this version of Laconica: "stoica",
566 which is what the Identi.ca site uses, and "default", which is a good
567 basis for other sites.
569 As of right now, your ability to change the theme is site-wide; users
570 can't choose their own theme. Additionally, the only thing you can
571 change in the theme is CSS stylesheets and some image files; you can't
572 change the HTML output, like adding or removing menu items.
574 You can choose a theme using the $config['site']['theme'] element in
575 the config.php file. See below for details.
577 You can add your own theme by making a sub-directory of the 'theme'
578 subdirectory with the name of your theme. Each theme can have the
581 display.css: a CSS2 file for "default" styling for all browsers.
582 ie6.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
584 ie7.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
586 logo.png: a logo image for the site.
587 default-avatar-profile.png: a 96x96 pixel image to use as the avatar for
588 users who don't upload their own.
589 default-avatar-stream.png: Ditto, but 48x48. For streams of notices.
590 default-avatar-mini.png: Ditto ditto, but 24x24. For subscriptions
591 listing on profile pages.
593 You may want to start by copying the files from the default theme to
599 Translations in Laconica use the gettext system (http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/).
600 Theoretically, you can add your own sub-directory to the locale/
601 subdirectory to add a new language to your system. You'll need to
602 compile the ".po" files into ".mo" files, however.
604 Contributions of translation information to Laconica are very easy:
605 you can use the Web interface at http://laconi.ca/entrans/ to add one
606 or a few or lots of new translations -- or even new languages. You can
607 also download more up-to-date .po files there, if you so desire.
612 There is no built-in system for doing backups in Laconica. You can make
613 backups of a working Laconica system by backing up the database and
614 the Web directory. To backup the database use mysqldump (http://ur1.ca/7xo)
615 and to backup the Web directory, try tar.
620 To use a Sphinx server to search users and notices, you also need
621 to install, compile and enable the sphinx pecl extension for php on the
622 client side, which itself depends on the sphinx development files.
623 "pecl install sphinx" should take care of that. Add "extension=sphinx.so"
624 to your php.ini and reload apache to enable it.
626 You can update your MySQL or Postgresql databases to drop their fulltext
627 search indexes, since they're now provided by sphinx.
629 On the sphinx server side, a script reads the main database and build
630 the keyword index. A cron job reads the database and keeps the sphinx
636 If you've been using Laconica 0.6, 0.5 or lower, or if you've been
637 tracking the "darcs" version of the software, you will probably want
638 to upgrade and keep your existing data. There is no automated upgrade
639 procedure in Laconica 0.6.2. Try these step-by-step instructions; read
640 to the end first before trying them.
642 0. Download Laconica and set up all the prerequisites as if you were
644 1. Make backups of both your database and your Web directory. UNDER NO
645 CIRCUMSTANCES should you try to do an upgrade without a known-good
646 backup. You have been warned.
647 2. Shut down Web access to your site, either by turning off your Web
648 server or by redirecting all pages to a "sorry, under maintenance"
650 3. Shut down XMPP access to your site, typically by shutting down the
651 xmppdaemon.php process and all other daemons that you're running.
652 If you've got "monit" or "cron" automatically restarting your
653 daemons, make sure to turn that off, too.
654 4. Shut down SMS and email access to your site. The easy way to do
655 this is to comment out the line piping incoming email to your
656 maildaemon.php file, and running something like "newaliases".
657 5. Once all writing processes to your site are turned off, make a
658 final backup of the Web directory and database.
659 6. Move your Laconica directory to a backup spot, like "mublog.bak".
660 7. Unpack your Laconica 0.6 tarball and move it to "mublog" or
661 wherever your code used to be.
662 8. Copy the config.php file and avatar directory from your old
663 directory to your new directory.
664 9. Copy htaccess.sample to .htaccess in the new directory. Change the
665 RewriteBase to use the correct path.
666 10. Rebuild the database. Go to your Laconica directory and run the
667 rebuilddb.sh script like this:
669 ./scripts/rebuilddb.sh rootuser rootpassword database db/laconica.sql
671 Here, rootuser and rootpassword are the username and password for a
672 user who can drop and create databases as well as tables; typically
673 that's _not_ the user Laconica runs as.
674 11. Use mysql client to log into your database and make sure that the
675 notice, user, profile, subscription etc. tables are non-empty.
676 12. Turn back on the Web server, and check that things still work.
677 13. Turn back on XMPP bots and email maildaemon. Note that the XMPP
678 bots have changed since version 0.5; see above for details.
680 If you're upgrading from very old versions, you may want to look at
681 the fixup_* scripts in the scripts directories. These will store some
682 precooked data in the DB. All upgraders should check out the inboxes
685 NOTE: the database definition file, stoica.ini, has been renamed to
686 laconica.ini (since this is the recommended database name). If you
687 have a line in your config.php pointing to the old name, you'll need
693 Before version 0.6.2, the page showing all notices from people the
694 user is subscribed to ("so-and-so with friends") was calculated at run
695 time. Starting with 0.6.2, we have a new data structure for holding a
696 user's "notice inbox". (Note: distinct from the "message inbox", which
697 is the "inbox" tab in the UI. The notice inbox appears under the
700 Notices are added to the inbox when they're created. This speeds up
701 the query considerably, and also allows us the opportunity, in the
702 future, to add different kind of notices to an inbox -- like @-replies
703 or subscriptions to search terms or hashtags.
705 Notice inboxes are enabled by default for new installations. If you
706 are upgrading an existing site, this means that your users will see
707 empty "Personal" pages. The following steps will help you fix the
710 0. $config['inboxes']['enabled'] can be set to one of three values. If
711 you set it to 'false', the site will work as before. Support for this
712 will probably be dropped in future versions.
713 1. Setting the flag to 'transitional' means that you're in transition.
714 In this mode, the code will run the "new query" or the "old query"
715 based on whether the user's inbox has been updated.
716 2. After setting the flag to "transitional", you can run the
717 fixup_inboxes.php script to create the inboxes. You may want to set
718 the memory limit high. You can re-run it without ill effect.
719 3. When fixup_inboxes is finished, you can set the enabled flag to
722 Configuration options
723 =====================
725 The sole configuration file for Laconica (excepting configurations for
726 dependency software) is config.php in your Laconica directory. If you
727 edit any other file in the directory, like lib/common.php (where most
728 of the defaults are defined), you will lose your configuration options
729 in any upgrade, and you will wish that you had been more careful.
731 Almost all configuration options are made through a two-dimensional
732 associative array, cleverly named $config. A typical configuration
735 $config['section']['option'] = value;
737 For brevity, the following documentation describes each section and
743 This section is a catch-all for site-wide variables.
745 name: the name of your site, like 'YourCompany Microblog'.
746 server: the server part of your site's URLs, like 'example.net'.
747 path: The path part of your site's URLs, like 'mublog' or '/'
749 fancy: whether or not your site uses fancy URLs (see Fancy URLs
750 section above). Default is false.
751 logfile: full path to a file for Laconica to save logging
752 information to. You may want to use this if you don't have
754 locale_path: full path to the directory for locale data. Unless you
755 store all your locale data in one place, you probably
756 don't need to use this.
757 language: default language for your site. Defaults to US English.
758 languages: A list of languages supported on your site. Typically you'd
759 only change this if you wanted to disable support for one
761 "unset($config['site']['languages']['de'])" will disable
763 theme: Theme for your site (see Theme section). Two themes are
764 provided by default: 'default' and 'stoica' (the one used by
765 Identi.ca). It's appreciated if you don't use the 'stoica' theme
766 except as the basis for your own.
767 email: contact email address for your site. By default, it's extracted
768 from your Web server environment; you may want to customize it.
769 broughtbyurl: name of an organization or individual who provides the
770 service. Each page will include a link to this name in the
771 footer. A good way to link to the blog, forum, wiki,
772 corporate portal, or whoever is making the service available.
773 broughtby: text used for the "brought by" link.
774 timezone: default timezone for message display. Users can set their
775 own time zone. Defaults to 'UTC', which is a pretty good default.
776 closed: If set to 'true', will disallow registration on your site.
777 This is a cheap way to restrict accounts to only one
778 individual or group; just register the accounts you want on
779 the service, *then* set this variable to 'true'.
780 inviteonly: If set to 'true', will only allow registration if the user
781 was invited by an existing user.
786 This section is a reference to the configuration options for
787 DB_DataObject (see http://ur1.ca/7xp). The ones that you may want to
788 set are listed below for clarity.
790 database: a DSN (Data Source Name) for your Laconica database. This is
791 in the format 'protocol://username:password@hostname/databasename',
792 where 'protocol' is 'mysql' (or possibly 'postgresql', if you
793 really know what you're doing), 'username' is the username,
794 'password' is the password, and etc.
795 ini_yourdbname: if your database is not named 'laconica', you'll need
796 to set this to point to the location of the
797 laconica.ini file. Note that the real name of your database
798 should go in there, not literally 'yourdbname'.
799 db_driver: You can try changing this to 'MDB2' to use the other driver
800 type for DB_DataObject, but note that it breaks the OpenID
801 libraries, which only support PEAR::DB.
802 debug: On a database error, you may get a message saying to set this
803 value to 5 to see debug messages in the browser. This breaks
804 just about all pages, and will also expose the username and
806 quote_identifiers: Set this to true if you're using postgresql.
807 type: either 'mysql' or 'postgresql' (used for some bits of
808 database-type-specific SQL in the code). Defaults to mysql.
809 mirror: you can set this to an array of DSNs, like the above
810 'database' value. If it's set, certain read-only actions will
811 use a random value out of this array for the database, rather
812 than the one in 'database' (actually, 'database' is overwritten).
813 You can offload a busy DB server by setting up MySQL replication
814 and adding the slaves to this array. Note that if you want some
815 requests to go to the 'database' (master) server, you'll need
816 to include it in this array, too.
821 By default, Laconica sites log error messages to the syslog facility.
822 (You can override this using the 'logfile' parameter described above).
824 appname: The name that Laconica uses to log messages. By default it's
825 "laconica", but if you have more than one installation on the
826 server, you may want to change the name for each instance so
827 you can track log messages more easily.
832 You can configure the software to queue time-consuming tasks, like
833 sending out SMS email or XMPP messages, for off-line processing. See
834 'Queues and daemons' above for how to set this up.
836 enabled: Whether to uses queues. Defaults to false.
841 The default license to use for your users notices. The default is the
842 Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which is probably the right
843 choice for any public site. Note that some other servers will not
844 accept notices if you apply a stricter license than this.
846 url: URL of the license, used for links.
847 title: Title for the license, like 'Creative Commons Attribution 3.0'.
848 image: A button shown on each page for the license.
853 This is for configuring out-going email. We use PEAR's Mail module,
854 see: http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.mail.mail.factory.php
856 backend: the backend to use for mail, one of 'mail', 'sendmail', and
857 'smtp'. Defaults to PEAR's default, 'mail'.
858 params: if the mail backend requires any parameters, you can provide
859 them in an associative array.
864 This is for configuring nicknames in the service.
866 blacklist: an array of strings for usernames that may not be
867 registered. A default array exists for strings that are
868 used by Laconica (e.g. 'doc', 'main', 'avatar', 'theme')
869 but you may want to add others if you have other software
870 installed in a subdirectory of Laconica or if you just
871 don't want certain words used as usernames.
872 featured: an array of nicknames of 'featured' users of the site.
873 Can be useful to draw attention to well-known users, or
874 interesting people, or whatever.
879 For configuring avatar access.
881 server: If set, defines another server where avatars are stored in the
882 root directory. Note that the 'avatar' subdir still has to be
883 writeable. You'd typically use this to split HTTP requests on
884 the client to speed up page loading, either with another
885 virtual server or with an NFS or SAMBA share. Clients
886 typically only make 2 connections to a single server at a
887 time (http://ur1.ca/6ih), so this can parallelize the job.
893 For configuring the public stream.
895 localonly: If set to true, only messages posted by users of this
896 service (rather than other services, filtered through OMB)
897 are shown in the public stream. Default true.
898 blacklist: An array of IDs of users to hide from the public stream.
899 Useful if you have someone making excessive Twitterfeed posts
900 to the site, other kinds of automated posts, testing bots, etc.
905 server: Like avatars, you can speed up page loading by pointing the
906 theme file lookup to another server (virtual or real). The
907 theme server's root path should map to the Laconica "theme"
908 subdirectory. Defaults to NULL.
913 For configuring the XMPP sub-system.
915 enabled: Whether to accept and send messages by XMPP. Default false.
916 server: server part of XMPP ID for update user.
917 port: connection port for clients. Default 5222, which you probably
918 shouldn't need to change.
919 user: username for the client connection. Users will receive messages
920 from 'user'@'server'.
921 resource: a unique identifier for the connection to the server. This
922 is actually used as a prefix for each XMPP component in the system.
923 password: password for the user account.
924 host: some XMPP domains are served by machines with a different
925 hostname. (For example, @gmail.com GTalk users connect to
926 talk.google.com). Set this to the correct hostname if that's the
927 case with your server.
928 encryption: Whether to encrypt the connection between Laconica and the
929 XMPP server. Defaults to true, but you can get
930 considerably better performance turning it off if you're
931 connecting to a server on the same machine or on a
933 debug: if turned on, this will make the XMPP library blurt out all of
934 the incoming and outgoing messages as XML stanzas. Use as a
935 last resort, and never turn it on if you don't have queues
936 enabled, since it will spit out sensitive data to the browser.
937 public: an array of JIDs to send _all_ notices to. This is useful for
938 participating in third-party search and archiving services.
943 Miscellaneous tagging stuff.
945 dropoff: Decay factor for tag listing, in seconds.
946 Defaults to exponential decay over ten days; you can twiddle
947 with it to try and get better results for your site.
952 For daemon processes.
954 piddir: directory that daemon processes should write their PID file
955 (process ID) to. Defaults to /var/run/, which is where this
956 stuff should usually go on Unix-ish systems.
957 user: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective user ID
958 to this user before running. Probably a good idea, especially if
959 you start the daemons as root. Note: user name, like 'daemon',
961 group: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective group ID
962 to this named group. Again, a name, not a numerical ID.
967 You can get a significant boost in performance by caching some
968 database data in memcached (http://www.danga.com/memcached/).
970 enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
971 server: a string with the hostname of the memcached server. Can also
972 be an array of hostnames, if you've got more than one server.
977 You can get a significant boost in performance using Sphinx Search
978 instead of your database server to search for users and notices.
979 (http://sphinxsearch.com/).
981 enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
982 server: a string with the hostname of the sphinx server.
983 port: an integer with the port number of the sphinx server.
988 A catch-all for integration with other systems.
990 source: The name to use for the source of posts to Twitter. Defaults
991 to 'laconica', but if you request your own source name from
992 Twitter (http://twitter.com/help/request_source), you can use
993 that here instead. Status updates on Twitter will then have
1001 enabled: A three-valued flag for whether to use notice inboxes (see
1002 upgrading info above for notes about this change). Can be
1003 'false', 'true', or '"transitional"'.
1008 The primary output for Laconica is syslog, unless you configured a
1009 separate logfile. This is probably the first place to look if you're
1010 getting weird behaviour from Laconica.
1012 If you're tracking the unstable version of Laconica in the darcs
1013 repository (see below), and you get a compilation error ("unexpected
1014 T_STRING") in the browser, check to see that you don't have any
1015 conflicts in your code.
1017 If you upgraded to Laconica 0.6.2 without reading the "Notice inboxes"
1018 section above, and all your users' 'Personal' tabs are empty, read the
1019 "Notice inboxes" section above.
1024 These are some myths you may see on the Web about Laconica.
1025 Documentation from the core team about Laconica has been pretty
1026 sparse, so some backtracking and guesswork resulted in some incorrect
1029 - "Set $config['db']['debug'] = 5 to debug the database." This is an
1030 extremely bad idea. It's a tool built into DB_DataObject that will
1031 emit oodles of print lines directly to the browser of your users.
1032 Among these lines will be your database username and password. Do
1033 not enable this option on a production Web site for any reason.
1035 - "Edit dataobject.ini with the following settings..." dataobject.ini
1036 is a development file for the DB_DataObject framework and is not
1037 used by the running software. It was removed from the Laconica
1038 distribution because its presence was confusing. Do not bother
1039 configuring dataobject.ini, and do not put your database username
1040 and password into the file on a production Web server; unscrupulous
1041 persons may try to read it to get your passwords.
1046 If you're adventurous or impatient, you may want to install the
1047 development version of Laconica. To get it, use the darcs version
1048 control tool (http://darcs.net/) like so:
1050 darcs get http://laconi.ca/darcs/ mublog
1052 To keep it up-to-date, use 'darcs pull'. Watch for conflicts!
1057 There are several ways to get more information about Laconica.
1059 * There is a mailing list for Laconica developers and admins at
1060 http://mail.laconi.ca/mailman/listinfo/laconica-dev
1061 * The #laconica IRC channel on freenode.net (http://www.freenode.net/).
1062 * The Laconica wiki, http://laconi.ca/trac/
1067 * Microblogging messages to http://identi.ca/evan are very welcome.
1068 * Laconica's Trac server has a bug tracker for any defects you may find,
1069 or ideas for making things better. http://laconi.ca/trac/
1070 * e-mail to evan@identi.ca will usually be read and responded to very
1071 quickly, unless the question is really hard.
1076 The following is an incomplete list of developers who've worked on
1077 Laconi.ca. Apologies for any oversight; please let evan@identi.ca know
1078 if anyone's been overlooked in error.
1080 * Evan Prodromou, founder and lead developer, Control Yourself, Inc.
1081 * Zach Copley, Control Yourself, Inc.
1082 * Earle Martin, Control Yourself, Inc.
1083 * Marie-Claude Doyon, designer, Control Yourself, Inc.
1084 * Sarven Capadisli, Control Yourself, Inc.
1085 * Robin Millette, Control Yourself, Inc.
1096 * Ken Sheppardson (Trac server, man-about-town)
1097 * Tiago 'gouki' Faria (entrans)
1098 * Tryggvi Björgvinsson
1100 Thanks also to the developers of our upstream library code and to the
1101 thousands of people who have tried out Identi.ca, installed Laconi.ca,
1102 told their friends, and built the Open Microblogging network to what