Installing Foswiki on a Shared Host - Generic Guide
This guide provides generic steps for installing Foswiki on a typical shared host.
1. Get and unpack the Foswiki code
The Foswiki code can be obtained from the
Download section
of the Foswiki home page.
If you have ssh-access to the web server, you can use
wget
to download the file to the server, using something like:
wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/foswiki/files/foswiki/Foswiki-2.0.1.tgz
Be sure to use the latest version!
Unpack the code:
tar xvzf Foswiki-2.0.1.tgz
2. Edit the LocalLib.cfg
file
Copy the file
bin/LocalLib.cfg.txt
to
bin/LocalLib.cfg
If your site uses cPanel, you might need to edit this file, and add a line
toward the top:
Check any specific instructions from your hosting provider
use cPanelUserConfig;
(You might need to edit this later ... but try foswiki without this first!)
Set the absolute path to the Foswiki lib
directory,
by modifying the line
$foswikiLibPath = "/absolute/path/to/your/lib";
appropriately.
Not needed for Foswiki 2.0
In a future step, a configure script will
be run to adapt the Foswiki settings to
match your system.
Accessing this configure script can only
be done when a user is granted access.
In this step we create this user.
Use
htpasswd
to create a
.htpasswd
file in
the
data
directory. Navigate to the Foswiki
data
directory
and issue the following at the command line
$ htpasswd -c .htpasswd admin_user_name
You will be prompted to enter (and confirm)
a password for the user. Obvious choices
for
admin_user_name
might be
admin
or
configure
,
but you can call it whatever you want (just remember that this is not a standard wiki user account name).
4. Copy and edit the appropriate .htaccess
files
Each of the Foswiki directories (including the root directory)
needs an
.htaccess
file; these allow indeed a per-directory
configuration for the web server.
Templates for these
.htaccess
files are distributed with
Foswiki and can be found in the root directory. It concerns
-
root-htaccess.txt
: should be copied to .htaccess
-
pub-htaccess.txt
: should be copied to pub/.htaccess
-
bin-htaccess.txt
: should be copied to bin/.htaccess
-
subdir-htaccess.txt
: should be copied to the remaining subdirectories (data
, lib
, locale
, templates
, tools
, and working
), e.g. tools/.htaccess
For all these
.htaccess
files, chances are that the default
content is fine to get started. For the the
bin/.htaccess
file,
however, it is compulsory to edit
- the path to the Foswiki scripts directory
bin/
- the path to the Foswiki data directory
data/
5. Proceed to your site with the expected view URL
http://yoursite.com/foswiki/bin/view
Foswiki should come up and display the front page along with a blue banner stating that you are running in
Bootstrap mode.
Follow the
InstallationGuide for saving the configuration and creating your first user.
Congratulations!