README
------
-Laconica 0.6.0
-22 September 2008
+Laconica 0.6.4 ("Catapult")
+11 December 2008
This is the README file for Laconica, the Open Source microblogging
platform. It includes installation instructions, descriptions of
New this version
================
-New features in version 0.6.0 include:
-
-* Invitations by email.
-* Users can mark messages as "favorites" (only Web, not API).
-* A bridge to push messages on the Laconica instance to an account on
- Twitter.
-* Direct private messages between users on a server (only Web, not API
- or IM or SMS).
-* Restructured off-line daemons.
+This is a minor feature and security improvement version from version
+0.6.3 (release 24 Nov 2008). Notable features of version 0.6.4 include:
+
+- "private" installs won't show any data to the outside world; redirect
+ non-logged-in users to login. (See "Private" below)
+- Ability to "block" a subscriber, which forces them to unsubscribe,
+ doesn't allow them to subscribe again, and doesn't allow them to send
+ @-replies
+- Fine-grained control of subscriptions; users can choose not to receive
+ notices from other users over SMS, or IM, or both
+- support for Mozilla microsummaries
+ (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Microsummaries)
+- more efficient support for blacklisting users from the public page
+- instructions on the public page for people who aren't logged in
+- better registration instructions
+- a check for license compatibility in receiving OMB notices
+- HTML output in RSS 1.0, 2.0, and Atom feeds
+- tuned and more reliable 'rememberme' cookies for username/password
+ and OpenID logins
+- a utility for setting user passwords
+- a "ban" configuration variable to ban certain users from posting
+ notices
+- an configurable posting throttle to keep any one user from flooding
+ the site with messages.
+- fine-tuned url-shortening: only shorten if it's needed, only expand
+ certain URLs, and handle failure of URL-shortening services reliably
+- disable Ajax input for notices, subscribe, nudge, while the
+ request is processing
+- early implementation of support for Last-Modified and ETag-based
+ caching
+- initial microformats support
+- redirect on bad nicknames in URLs
+- correctly send emails in recipient's, not sender's, language
+- correct email content type
+- Change "Most Favorited" page to "Popular"
+- properly support the "since" parameter in API calls
+- Fix for changes in validate_credentials API call for the Twitter
+ bridge
+- Fix for fatal error when sending email confirmation on registration
+- Better replies for commands sent through the Ajax channel
+- Add a User-Agent string for OMB requests
+- Upgrade upstream library XMPPHP
+- Upgrade upstream library JQuery Forms
+- Code cleanup: checkboxes have proper <label> elements
+- Code cleanup: consolidated various notice-listing code in one place
+- Better support for unsubscribing from a remote user
+- Stump of experimental Facebook application (not ready for use! code
+ review only!)
+- Stump of experimental user account deletion (not ready for use! code
+ review only!)
Prerequisites
=============
*must* support the MyISAM storage engine -- the default for most
MySQL servers -- *and* the InnoDB storage engine.
- A Web server. Preferably, you should have Apache 2.2.x with the
- mod_rewrite extension installed and enabled.
+ mod_rewrite extension installed and enabled.
Your PHP installation must include the following PHP extensions:
- MySQL. For accessing the database.
- GD. For scaling down avatar images.
- mbstring. For handling Unicode (UTF-8) encoded strings.
+- gettext. For multiple languages. Default on many PHP installs.
For some functionality, you will also need the following extensions:
server to store the data in.
- Mailparse. Efficient parsing of email requires this extension.
Submission by email or SMS-over-email uses this extension.
-
+- Sphinx Search. A client for the sphinx server, an alternative
+ to MySQL or Postgresql fulltext search. You will also need a
+ Sphinx server to serve the search queries.
+
You will almost definitely get 2-3 times better performance from your
site if you install a PHP bytecode cache/accelerator. Some well-known
examples are: eaccelerator, Turck mmcache, xcache, apc. Zend Optimizer
but won't work with OpenID.
http://pear.php.net/package/DB
- OAuth.php from http://oauth.googlecode.com/svn/code/php/
-- markdown.php from http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/
+- markdown.php from http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/
- PEAR Mail, for sending out mail notifications
http://pear.php.net/package/Mail
- PEAR Net_SMTP, if you use the SMTP factory for notifications
http://pear.php.net/package/Net_SMTP
+- PEAR Net_Socket, if you use the SMTP factory for notifications
+ http://pear.php.net/package/Net_Socket
- XMPPHP, the follow-up to Class.Jabber.php. Probably the best XMPP
library available for PHP. http://xmpphp.googlecode.com/. Note that
as of this writing the version of this library that is available in
1. Unpack the tarball you downloaded on your Web server. Usually a
command like this will work:
-
- tar zxf laconica-0.6.0.tar.gz
-
- ...which will make a laconica-0.6.0 subdirectory in your current
+
+ tar zxf laconica-0.6.4.tar.gz
+
+ ...which will make a laconica-0.6.4 subdirectory in your current
directory. (If you don't have shell access on your Web server, you
may have to unpack the tarball on your local computer and FTP the
files to the server.)
-
+
2. Move the tarball to a directory of your choosing in your Web root
directory. Usually something like this will work:
-
- mv laconica-0.6.0 /var/www/mublog
-
+
+ mv laconica-0.6.4 /var/www/mublog
+
This will make your Laconica instance available in the mublog path of
your server, like "http://example.net/mublog". "microblog" or
"laconica" might also be good path names. If you know how to
configure virtual hosts on your web server, you can try setting up
"http://micro.example.net/" or the like.
-
+
3. You should also take this moment to make your avatar subdirectory
writeable by the Web server. An insecure way to do this is:
-
+
chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/avatar
-
+
On some systems, this will probably work:
-
+
chgrp www-data /var/www/mublog/avatar
chmod g+w /var/www/mublog/avatar
4. Create a database to hold your microblog data. Something like this
should work:
-
+
mysqladmin -u "username" --password="password" create laconica
-
+
Note that Laconica must have its own database; you can't share the
database with another program. You can name it whatever you want,
though.
-
+
(If you don't have shell access to your server, you may need to use
a tool like PHPAdmin to create a database. Check your hosting
service's documentation for how to create a new MySQL database.)
You may want to test by logging into the database and checking that
the tables were created. Here's an example:
-
+
SHOW TABLES;
-
+
6. Create a new database account that Laconica will use to access the
database. If you have shell access, this will probably work from the
MySQL shell:
-
+
GRANT SELECT,INSERT,DELETE,UPDATE on laconica.*
TO 'lacuser'@'localhost'
IDENTIFIED BY 'lacpassword';
-
+
You should change 'lacuser' and 'lacpassword' to your preferred new
username and password. You may want to test logging in as this new
user and testing that you can SELECT from some of the tables in the
DB (use SHOW TABLES to see which ones are there).
-
+
7. Copy the config.php.sample in the Laconica directory to config.php.
8. Edit config.php to set the basic configuration for your system.
(See descriptions below for basic config options.) Note that there
are lots of options and if you try to do them all at once, you will
have a hard time making sure what's working and what's not. So,
- stick with the basics at first.
+ stick with the basics at first. In particular, customizing the
+ 'site' and 'db' settings will almost definitely be needed.
9. At this point, you should be able to navigate in a browser to your
microblog's main directory and see the "Public Timeline", which
will be empty. If not, magic has happened! You can now register a
new user, post some notices, edit your profile, etc. However, you
may want to wait to do that stuff if you think you can set up
- "fancy URLs" (see below), since some URLs are stored in the database.
-
+ "fancy URLs" (see below), since some URLs are stored in the database.
+
Fancy URLs
----------
import the .htaccess file into your conf file instead. If you're
not sure how to do it, you may save yourself a lot of headache by
just leaving the .htaccess file.
-
+
2. Change the "RewriteBase" in the new .htaccess file to be the URL path
to your Laconica installation on your server. Typically this will
be the path to your Laconica directory relative to your Web root.
3. Add or uncomment or change a line in your config.php file so it says:
$config['site']['fancy'] = true;
-
+
You should now be able to navigate to a "fancy" URL on your server,
like:
earlier than 2.2.x, try changing the regular expressions in the
htaccess.sample file that use "\w" to just use ".".
+Sphinx
+------
+
+To use a Sphinx server to search users and notices, you also need
+to install, compile and enable the sphinx pecl extension for php on the
+client side, which itself depends on the sphinx development files.
+"pecl install sphinx" should take care of that. Add "extension=sphinx.so"
+to your php.ini and reload apache to enable it.
+
+You can update your MySQL or Postgresql databases to drop their fulltext
+search indexes, since they're now provided by sphinx.
+
+On the sphinx server side, a script reads the main database and build
+the keyword index. A cron job reads the database and keeps the sphinx
+indexes up to date. scripts/sphinx-cron.sh should be called by cron
+every 5 minutes, for example. scripts/sphinx.sh is an init.d script
+to start and stop the sphinx search daemon.
+
SMS
---
2. Make sure the maildaemon.php file is executable:
- chmod +x scripts/maildaemon.php
-
+ chmod +x scripts/maildaemon.php
+
Note that "daemon" is kind of a misnomer here; the script is more
of a filter than a daemon.
-
+
2. Edit /etc/aliases on your mail server and add the following line:
*: /path/to/laconica/scripts/maildaemon.php
3. Run whatever code you need to to update your aliases database. For
many mail servers (Postfix, Exim, Sendmail), this should work:
-
+
newaliases
-
+
You may need to restart your mail server for the new database to
take effect.
4. Set the following in your config.php file:
$config['mail']['domain'] = 'yourdomain.example.net';
-
+
At this point, post-by-email and post-by-SMS-gateway should work. Note
that if your mail server is on a different computer from your email
server, you'll need to have a full installation of Laconica, a working
1. You may want to strongly consider setting up your own XMPP server.
Ejabberd, OpenFire, and JabberD are all Open Source servers.
Jabber, Inc. provides a high-performance commercial server.
-
+
2. You must register a Jabber ID (JID) with your new server. It helps
to choose a name like "update@example.com" or "notice" or something
similar. Alternately, your "update JID" can be registered on a
publicly-available XMPP service, like jabber.org or GTalk.
-
+
Laconica will not register the JID with your chosen XMPP server;
you need to do this manually, with an XMPP client like Gajim,
Telepathy, or Pidgin.im.
-
+
3. Configure your site's XMPP variables, as described below in the
configuration section.
-
+
On a default installation, your site can broadcast messages using
XMPP. Users won't be able to post messages using XMPP unless you've
got the XMPP daemon running. See 'Queues and daemons' below for how
their "JID" (Jabber ID) to your config.php as follows:
$config['xmpp']['public'][] = 'downstream@example.net';
-
+
(Don't miss those square brackets at the end.) Note that your XMPP
broadcasting must be configured as mentioned above. Although you can
send out messages at "Web time", high-volume sites should strongly
server!), set the following variable:
$config['queue']['enabled'] = true;
-
+
+ You may also want to look at the 'daemon' section of this file for
+ more daemon options. Note that if you set the 'user' and/or 'group'
+ options, you'll need to create that user and/or group by hand.
+ They're not created automatically.
+
4. On the queues server, run the command scripts/startdaemons.sh. It
needs as a parameter the install path; if you run it from the
Laconica dir, "." should suffice.
-
+
This will run six (for now) queue handlers:
* xmppdaemon.php - listens for new XMPP messages from users and stores
default. This can be useful for starting, stopping, and monitoring the
daemons.
+Twitter Friends Syncing
+-----------------------
+
+As of Laconica 0.6.3, users may set a flag in their settings ("Subscribe
+to my Twitter friends here" under the Twitter tab) to have Laconica
+attempt to locate and subscribe to "friends" (people they "follow") on
+Twitter who also have accounts on your Laconica system, and who have
+previously set up a link for automatically posting notices to Twitter.
+
+Optionally, there is a script (./scripts/synctwitterfriends.php), meant
+to be run periodically from a job scheduler (e.g.: cron under Unix), to
+look for new additions to users' friends lists. Note that the friends
+syncing only subscribes users to each other, it does not unsubscribe
+users when they stop following each other on Twitter.
+
+Sample cron job:
+
+# Update Twitter friends subscriptions every half hour
+0,30 * * * * /path/to/php /path/to/laconica/scripts/synctwitterfriends.php>&/dev/null
+
Sitemaps
--------
bots where to find all the sitemap files; it *must* be in the main
installation directory or higher. Both types of file must be
available through HTTP.
-
+
2. To generate your sitemaps, run the following command on your server:
php scripts/sitemap.php -f index-file-path -d sitemap-directory -u URL-prefix-for-sitemaps
you want the sitemaps stored, like './sitemaps/' (make sure the dir
exists). URL-prefix-for-sitemaps is the full URL for the sitemap dir,
typically something like 'http://example.net/mublog/sitemaps/'.
-
+
You can use several methods for submitting your sitemap index to
search engines to get your site indexed. One is to add a line like the
following to your robots.txt file:
subdirectory to add a new language to your system. You'll need to
compile the ".po" files into ".mo" files, however.
+Contributions of translation information to Laconica are very easy:
+you can use the Web interface at http://laconi.ca/entrans/ to add one
+or a few or lots of new translations -- or even new languages. You can
+also download more up-to-date .po files there, if you so desire.
+
+Backups
+-------
+
+There is no built-in system for doing backups in Laconica. You can make
+backups of a working Laconica system by backing up the database and
+the Web directory. To backup the database use mysqldump (http://ur1.ca/7xo)
+and to backup the Web directory, try tar.
+
+Private
+-------
+
+The administrator can set the "private" flag for a site so that it's
+not visible to non-logged-in users. This might be useful for
+workgroups who want to share a microblogging site for project
+management, but host it on a public server.
+
+Note that this is an experimental feature; total privacy is not
+guaranteed or ensured. Also, privacy is all-or-nothing for a site; you
+can't have some accounts or notices private, and others public.
+Finally, the interaction of private sites with OpenMicroBlogging is
+undefined. Remote users won't be able to subscribe to users on a
+private site, but users of the private site may be able to subscribe
+to users on a remote site. (Or not... it's not well tested.) The
+"proper behaviour" hasn't been defined here, so handle with care.
+
Upgrading
=========
-If you've been using Laconica 0.5 or lower, or if you've been tracking
-the "darcs" version of the software, you will probably want to upgrade
-and keep your existing data. There is no automated upgrade procedure
-in Laconica 0.6. Try these step-by-step instructions; read to the end
-first before trying them.
+If you've been using Laconica 0.6, 0.5 or lower, or if you've been
+tracking the "git" version of the software, you will probably want
+to upgrade and keep your existing data. There is no automated upgrade
+procedure in Laconica 0.6.4. Try these step-by-step instructions; read
+to the end first before trying them.
0. Download Laconica and set up all the prerequisites as if you were
doing a new install.
RewriteBase to use the correct path.
10. Rebuild the database. Go to your Laconica directory and run the
rebuilddb.sh script like this:
-
+
./scripts/rebuilddb.sh rootuser rootpassword database db/laconica.sql
-
+
Here, rootuser and rootpassword are the username and password for a
user who can drop and create databases as well as tables; typically
that's _not_ the user Laconica runs as.
If you're upgrading from very old versions, you may want to look at
the fixup_* scripts in the scripts directories. These will store some
-precooked data in the DB.
+precooked data in the DB. All upgraders should check out the inboxes
+options below.
+
+NOTE: the database definition file, stoica.ini, has been renamed to
+laconica.ini (since this is the recommended database name). If you
+have a line in your config.php pointing to the old name, you'll need
+to update it.
+
+Notice inboxes
+--------------
+
+Before version 0.6.2, the page showing all notices from people the
+user is subscribed to ("so-and-so with friends") was calculated at run
+time. Starting with 0.6.2, we have a new data structure for holding a
+user's "notice inbox". (Note: distinct from the "message inbox", which
+is the "inbox" tab in the UI. The notice inbox appears under the
+"Personal" tab.)
+
+Notices are added to the inbox when they're created. This speeds up
+the query considerably, and also allows us the opportunity, in the
+future, to add different kind of notices to an inbox -- like @-replies
+or subscriptions to search terms or hashtags.
+
+Notice inboxes are enabled by default for new installations. If you
+are upgrading an existing site, this means that your users will see
+empty "Personal" pages. The following steps will help you fix the
+problem.
+
+0. $config['inboxes']['enabled'] can be set to one of three values. If
+ you set it to 'false', the site will work as before. Support for this
+ will probably be dropped in future versions.
+1. Setting the flag to 'transitional' means that you're in transition.
+ In this mode, the code will run the "new query" or the "old query"
+ based on whether the user's inbox has been updated.
+2. After setting the flag to "transitional", you can run the
+ fixup_inboxes.php script to create the inboxes. You may want to set
+ the memory limit high. You can re-run it without ill effect.
+3. When fixup_inboxes is finished, you can set the enabled flag to
+ 'true'.
Configuration options
=====================
(installed in root).
fancy: whether or not your site uses fancy URLs (see Fancy URLs
section above). Default is false.
-logfile: full path to a file for Laconica to save logging
+logfile: full path to a file for Laconica to save logging
information to. You may want to use this if you don't have
access to syslog.
locale_path: full path to the directory for locale data. Unless you
This is a cheap way to restrict accounts to only one
individual or group; just register the accounts you want on
the service, *then* set this variable to 'true'.
+inviteonly: If set to 'true', will only allow registration if the user
+ was invited by an existing user.
+private: If set to 'true', anonymous users will be redirected to the
+ 'login' page. Also, API methods that normally require no
+ authentication will require it. Note that this does not turn
+ off registration; use 'closed' or 'inviteonly' for the
+ behaviour you want.
+
+db
+--
+
+This section is a reference to the configuration options for
+DB_DataObject (see http://ur1.ca/7xp). The ones that you may want to
+set are listed below for clarity.
+
+database: a DSN (Data Source Name) for your Laconica database. This is
+ in the format 'protocol://username:password@hostname/databasename',
+ where 'protocol' is 'mysql' or 'mysqli' (or possibly 'postgresql', if you
+ really know what you're doing), 'username' is the username,
+ 'password' is the password, and etc.
+ini_yourdbname: if your database is not named 'laconica', you'll need
+ to set this to point to the location of the
+ laconica.ini file. Note that the real name of your database
+ should go in there, not literally 'yourdbname'.
+db_driver: You can try changing this to 'MDB2' to use the other driver
+ type for DB_DataObject, but note that it breaks the OpenID
+ libraries, which only support PEAR::DB.
+debug: On a database error, you may get a message saying to set this
+ value to 5 to see debug messages in the browser. This breaks
+ just about all pages, and will also expose the username and
+ password
+quote_identifiers: Set this to true if you're using postgresql.
+type: either 'mysql' or 'postgresql' (used for some bits of
+ database-type-specific SQL in the code). Defaults to mysql.
+mirror: you can set this to an array of DSNs, like the above
+ 'database' value. If it's set, certain read-only actions will
+ use a random value out of this array for the database, rather
+ than the one in 'database' (actually, 'database' is overwritten).
+ You can offload a busy DB server by setting up MySQL replication
+ and adding the slaves to this array. Note that if you want some
+ requests to go to the 'database' (master) server, you'll need
+ to include it in this array, too.
syslog
------
'smtp'. Defaults to PEAR's default, 'mail'.
params: if the mail backend requires any parameters, you can provide
them in an associative array.
-
+
nickname
--------
but you may want to add others if you have other software
installed in a subdirectory of Laconica or if you just
don't want certain words used as usernames.
+featured: an array of nicknames of 'featured' users of the site.
+ Can be useful to draw attention to well-known users, or
+ interesting people, or whatever.
avatar
------
localonly: If set to true, only messages posted by users of this
service (rather than other services, filtered through OMB)
are shown in the public stream. Default true.
+blacklist: An array of IDs of users to hide from the public stream.
+ Useful if you have someone making excessive Twitterfeed posts
+ to the site, other kinds of automated posts, testing bots, etc.
theme
-----
dropoff: Decay factor for tag listing, in seconds.
Defaults to exponential decay over ten days; you can twiddle
with it to try and get better results for your site.
-
+
daemon
------
group: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective group ID
to this named group. Again, a name, not a numerical ID.
+memcached
+---------
+
+You can get a significant boost in performance by caching some
+database data in memcached (http://www.danga.com/memcached/).
+
+enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
+server: a string with the hostname of the memcached server. Can also
+ be an array of hostnames, if you've got more than one server.
+
+sphinx
+------
+
+You can get a significant boost in performance using Sphinx Search
+instead of your database server to search for users and notices.
+(http://sphinxsearch.com/).
+
+enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
+server: a string with the hostname of the sphinx server.
+port: an integer with the port number of the sphinx server.
+
+integration
+-----------
+
+A catch-all for integration with other systems.
+
+source: The name to use for the source of posts to Twitter. Defaults
+ to 'laconica', but if you request your own source name from
+ Twitter (http://twitter.com/help/request_source), you can use
+ that here instead. Status updates on Twitter will then have
+ links to your site.
+
+inboxes
+-------
+
+For notice inboxes.
+
+enabled: A three-valued flag for whether to use notice inboxes (see
+ upgrading info above for notes about this change). Can be
+ 'false', 'true', or '"transitional"'.
+
+throttle
+--------
+
+For notice-posting throttles.
+
+enabled: Whether to throttle posting. Defaults to false.
+count: Each user can make this many posts in 'timespan' seconds. So, if count
+ is 100 and timespan is 3600, then there can be only 100 posts
+ from a user every hour.
+timespan: see 'count'.
+
+profile
+-------
+
+Profile management.
+
+banned: an array of usernames and/or profile IDs of 'banned' profiles.
+ The site will reject any notices by these users -- they will
+ not be accepted at all. (Compare with blacklisted users above,
+ whose posts just won't show up in the public stream.)
+
Troubleshooting
===============
separate logfile. This is probably the first place to look if you're
getting weird behaviour from Laconica.
-If you're tracking the unstable version of Laconica in the darcs
+If you're tracking the unstable version of Laconica in the git
repository (see below), and you get a compilation error ("unexpected
T_STRING") in the browser, check to see that you don't have any
conflicts in your code.
+If you upgraded to Laconica 0.6.4 without reading the "Notice inboxes"
+section above, and all your users' 'Personal' tabs are empty, read the
+"Notice inboxes" section above.
+
Myths
=====
emit oodles of print lines directly to the browser of your users.
Among these lines will be your database username and password. Do
not enable this option on a production Web site for any reason.
-
+
- "Edit dataobject.ini with the following settings..." dataobject.ini
is a development file for the DB_DataObject framework and is not
used by the running software. It was removed from the Laconica
================
If you're adventurous or impatient, you may want to install the
-development version of Laconica. To get it, use the darcs version
-control tool (http://darcs.net/) like so:
+development version of Laconica. To get it, use the git version
+control tool (http://git-scm.com/) like so:
+
+ git clone http://laconi.ca/software/laconica.git
- darcs get http://laconi.ca/darcs/ mublog
-
-To keep it up-to-date, use 'darcs pull'. Watch for conflicts!
+To keep it up-to-date, use 'git pull'. Watch for conflicts!
Further information
===================
* Zach Copley, Control Yourself, Inc.
* Earle Martin, Control Yourself, Inc.
* Marie-Claude Doyon, designer, Control Yourself, Inc.
+* Sarven Capadisli, Control Yourself, Inc.
+* Robin Millette, Control Yourself, Inc.
* Ciaran Gultnieks
* Michael Landers
* Ori Avtalion
* Gina Haeussge
* Ken Sheppardson (Trac server, man-about-town)
* Tiago 'gouki' Faria (entrans)
+* Tryggvi Björgvinsson
-Thanks also to the thousands of people who have tried out Identi.ca,
-installed Laconi.ca, told their friends, and built the Open
-Microblogging network to what it is today.
+Thanks also to the developers of our upstream library code and to the
+thousands of people who have tried out Identi.ca, installed Laconi.ca,
+told their friends, and built the Open Microblogging network to what
+it is today.
projects / quix0rs-gnu-social.git / blobdiff