If you cannot run PhpWiki on top of a relational database like
MySQL or Postgresql, and your system does not support DBM files
or (worse) has a broken implementation like NDBM on Solaris, then
a flat file Wiki should work for you. Note that as of 1.2 most of the
Wiki functionality is there... the MostPopular is not implemented yet
so you will want to delete that link from the FrontPage (or better
yet, write it and mail us a patch ;-)
Installation is similar to using a DBM file for storing the pages.
You should read the main INSTALL file before this one (it's not long
and complicated so go ahead and we'll wait for you right here).
First, edit lib/config.php and set the database to "file":
$WhichDatabase = 'file'; // use one of "dbm", "mysql", "pgsql", "msql",
// or "file"
Now, the key thing is you need a directory that the web server can
read and write to. This is where it will store current and archived
pages.
If you have root access the next section applies to you. If you don't
have root access, skip down to the section "I DON'T HAVE ROOT ACCESS"
to see what options you have.
Choose where you want to have the pages stored; on my system I put
them in a directory under the PhpWiki root directory. That is, I
installed my PhpWiki in /home/swain/public_html/flatfiletest/phpwiki.
I created a directory called "pages" like this:
[root@localhost phpwiki]# mkdir pages
This creates a new directory:
[swain@localhost phpwiki]$ ls -l
total 65
-rw-r--r-- 1 swain swain 1776 Dec 22 16:10 CREDITS
-rw-r--r-- 1 swain swain 6323 Dec 12 16:53 DBLIB.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 swain swain 10373 Nov 5 22:19 HISTORY
-rw-r--r-- 1 swain swain 3241 Oct 8 15:08 INSTALL
-rw-r--r-- 1 swain swain 1241 Oct 8 14:12 INSTALL.mSQL
-rw-r--r-- 1 swain swain 1584 Oct 8 14:12 INSTALL.mysql
-rw-r--r-- 1 swain swain 2001 Oct 8 15:19 INSTALL.pgsql
-rw-r--r-- 1 swain swain 18106 Jun 2 2000 LICENSE
-rw-r--r-- 1 swain swain 2873 Dec 12 16:24 README
drwxrwxr-x 2 swain swain 1024 Jan 1 18:46 admin
-rw-r--r-- 1 swain swain 2366 Nov 13 05:59 admin.php
drwxrwxr-x 2 swain swain 1024 Jan 1 18:46 images
-rw-r--r-- 1 swain swain 1305 Nov 8 10:34 index.php
drwxrwxr-x 2 swain swain 1024 Jan 3 22:44 lib
drwxrwxr-x 6 swain swain 1024 Jan 1 18:46 locale
drwxrwxr-x 4 swain swain 1024 Jan 1 18:50 pages
drwxrwxr-x 2 swain swain 1024 Jan 1 18:46 pgsrc
drwxrwxr-x 2 swain swain 1024 Jan 1 18:46 schemas
drwxrwxr-x 2 swain swain 1024 Jan 1 18:46 templates
Next, I'm going to change the owner of the directory. Your web server
probably runs as user "nobody," so I log in as root and run the chown
command:
[swain@localhost phpwiki]$ su
Password:
[root@localhost phpwiki]# chown nobody:nobody pages
Now the directory is read/writable by "nobody" and should work
fine. If your web server runs as a different user substitute the
appropriate name.
I DON'T HAVE ROOT ACCESS...
If you do not have root access to your machine you are in a tougher
situation. What you can do is give the directory read/write permission
to anybody, but for security reasons this is a bad idea.
The second thing you can do is have your systems administrator install
PhpWiki for you, or at least follow the steps above to create a
directory owned by the web server.
Another solution is to let the web server create the directory for
you. The drawback to this approach is that you won't be able to edit
the files or copy them from the command line, but most people can live
with this limitation. (This is how you would do it on SourceForge, by
the way; they have a cron job that sweeps the filesystem every few
hours looking for things that are set world writable and change the
permission.) This will require you to TEMPORARILY make the phpwiki/
directory world writable:
cd ..
chmod o+wr phpwiki
cd phpwiki/
and create a PHP file like this:
<html>
<head>
<title>Make a directory</title>
</head>
<?
/*
I created this to set up server-writable files
for the Wiki. You shouldn't have world writable files.
*/
$int = mkdir("pages", 0775);
if ($int) { echo "mkdir returned $int (success)\n"; }
?>
</html>
Put the file in the phpwiki/ directory and call it through a web
browser. This should create a directory owned by the web server in the
phpwiki/ directory.
IMPORTANT
Now you need to restore the permissions of the phpwiki directory
itself:
cd ..
chmod 755 phpwiki
If you have problems after all of this, try contacting the
phpwiki-talk list at phpwiki-talk@lists.sourceforge.net.
Steve Wainstead
swain@panix.com
$Id$
