------ README ------ StatusNet 0.9.0 ("Stand") 4 Mar 2010 This is the README file for StatusNet, the Open Source microblogging platform. It includes installation instructions, descriptions of options you can set, warnings, tips, and general info for administrators. Information on using StatusNet can be found in the "doc" subdirectory or in the "help" section on-line. About ===== StatusNet is a Free and Open Source microblogging platform. It helps people in a community, company or group to exchange short (140 characters, by default) messages over the Web. Users can choose which people to "follow" and receive only their friends' or colleagues' status messages. It provides a similar service to sites like Twitter, Google Buzz, or Yammer. With a little work, status messages can be sent to mobile phones, instant messenger programs (GTalk/Jabber), and specially-designed desktop clients that support the Twitter API. StatusNet supports an open standard called OStatus that lets users in different networks follow each other. It enables a distributed social network spread all across the Web. StatusNet was originally developed for the Open Software Service, Identi.ca . It is shared with you in hope that you too make an Open Software Service available to your users. To learn more, please see the Open Software Service Definition 1.1: http://www.opendefinition.org/ossd StatusNet, Inc. also offers this software as a Web service, requiring no installation on your part. The software run on status.net is identical to the software available for download, so you can move back and forth between a hosted version or a version installed on your own servers. License ======= This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with this program, in the file "COPYING". If not, see . IMPORTANT NOTE: The GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) has *different requirements* from the "regular" GPL. In particular, if you make modifications to the StatusNet source code on your server, you *MUST MAKE AVAILABLE* the modified version of the source code to your users under the same license. This is a legal requirement of using the software, and if you do not wish to share your modifications, *YOU MAY NOT INSTALL STATUSNET*. Additional library software has been made available in the 'extlib' directory. All of it is Free Software and can be distributed under liberal terms, but those terms may differ in detail from the AGPL's particulars. See each package's license file in the extlib directory for additional terms. New this version ================ This is a major feature release since version 0.8.3, released Feb 1 2010. It is the final release version of 0.9.0. Notable changes this version: - Support for the new distributed status update standard OStatus , based on PubSubHubbub, Salmon, Webfinger, and Activity Streams. - Support for location. Notices are (optionally) marked with lat-long information, and can be shown on a map. - No fixed content size. Notice size is configurable, from 1 to unlimited number of characters. Default is still 140! - An authorization framework, allowing different levels of users. - A Web-based administration panel. - A moderation system that lets site moderators sandbox, silence, or delete uncooperative users. - A flag system that lets users flag profiles for moderator review. - Support for OAuth authentication in the Twitter API. - A pluggable authentication system. - An authentication plugin for LDAP servers. - Many features that were core in 0.8.x are now plugins, such as OpenID, Twitter integration, Facebook integration - A much-improved offline processing system - In-browser "realtime" updates using a number of realtime servers (Meteor, Orbited, Cometd) - A plugin to provide an interface optimized for mobile browsers - Support for Facebook Connect - Support for logging in with a Twitter account - Vastly improved translation with additional languages and translation in plugins - Support for all-SSL instances - Core support for "repeats" (like Twitter's "retweets") - Pluggable caching system, with plugins for Memcached, APC, XCache, and a disk-based cache - Plugin to support RSSCloud - A framework for adding advertisements to a public site, and plugins for Google AdSense and OpenX server - Plugins to throttle excessive subscriptions and registrations. - A plugin to blacklist particular URLs or nicknames. There are also literally thousands of bugs fixed and minor features added. A full changelog is available at http://status.net/wiki/StatusNet_0.9.0. Under the covers, the software has a vastly improved plugin and extension mechanism that makes writing powerful and flexible additions to the core functionality much easier. Prerequisites ============= The following software packages are *required* for this software to run correctly. - PHP 5.2.3+. It may be possible to run this software on earlier versions of PHP, but many of the functions used are only available in PHP 5.2 or above. - MySQL 5.x. The StatusNet database is stored, by default, in a MySQL server. It has been primarily tested on 5.x servers, although it may be possible to install on earlier (or later!) versions. The server *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. Your PHP installation must include the following PHP extensions: - Curl. This is for fetching files by HTTP. - XMLWriter. This is for formatting XML and HTML output. - 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: - Memcache. A client for the memcached server, which caches database information in volatile memory. This is important for adequate performance on high-traffic sites. You will also need a memcached 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. - bcmath or gmp. For Salmon signatures (part of OStatus). Needed if you have OStatus configured. 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 is a proprietary accelerator installed on some hosting sites. External libraries ------------------ A number of external PHP libraries are used to provide basic functionality and optional functionality for your system. For your convenience, they are available in the "extlib" directory of this package, and you do not have to download and install them. However, you may want to keep them up-to-date with the latest upstream version, and the URLs are listed here for your convenience. - DB_DataObject http://pear.php.net/package/DB_DataObject - Validate http://pear.php.net/package/Validate - OpenID from OpenIDEnabled (not the PEAR version!). We decided to use the openidenabled.com version since it's more widely implemented, and seems to be better supported. http://openidenabled.com/php-openid/ - PEAR DB. Although this is an older data access system (new packages should probably use PHP DBO), the OpenID libraries depend on PEAR DB so we use it here, too. DB_DataObject can also use PEAR MDB2, which may give you better performance 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/ - 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 the extlib directory is *significantly different* from the upstream version (patches have been submitted). Upgrading to the upstream version may render your StatusNet site unable to send or receive XMPP messages. - Facebook library. Used for the Facebook application. - PEAR Services_oEmbed. Used for some multimedia integration. - PEAR HTTP_Request is an oEmbed dependency. - PEAR Validate is an oEmbed dependency. - PEAR Net_URL2 is an oEmbed dependency. - Console_GetOpt for parsing command-line options. - libomb. a library for implementing OpenMicroBlogging 0.1, the predecessor to OStatus. - HTTP_Request2, a library for making HTTP requests. A design goal of StatusNet is that the basic Web functionality should work on even the most restrictive commercial hosting services. However, additional functionality, such as receiving messages by Jabber/GTalk, require that you be able to run long-running processes on your account. In addition, posting by email or from SMS require that you be able to install a mail filter in your mail server. Installation ============ Installing the basic StatusNet Web component is relatively easy, especially if you've previously installed PHP/MySQL packages. 1. Unpack the tarball you downloaded on your Web server. Usually a command like this will work: tar zxf statusnet-0.9.0.tar.gz ...which will make a statusnet-0.9.0 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 statusnet-0.9.0 /var/www/statusnet This will make your StatusNet instance available in the statusnet path of your server, like "http://example.net/statusnet". "microblog" or "statusnet" 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. Make your target directory writeable by the Web server. chmod a+w /var/www/statusnet/ On some systems, this will probably work: chgrp www-data /var/www/statusnet/ chmod g+w /var/www/statusnet/ If your Web server runs as another user besides "www-data", try that user's default group instead. As a last resort, you can create a new group like "statusnet" and add the Web server's user to the group. 4. You should also take this moment to make your avatar, background, and file subdirectories writeable by the Web server. An insecure way to do this is: chmod a+w /var/www/statusnet/avatar chmod a+w /var/www/statusnet/background chmod a+w /var/www/statusnet/file You can also make the avatar, background, and file directories writeable by the Web server group, as noted above. 5. Create a database to hold your microblog data. Something like this should work: mysqladmin -u "username" --password="password" create statusnet Note that StatusNet 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.) 6. Create a new database account that StatusNet will use to access the database. If you have shell access, this will probably work from the MySQL shell: GRANT ALL on statusnet.* TO 'statusnetuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'statusnetpassword'; You should change 'statusnetuser' and 'statusnetpassword' to your preferred new username and password. You may want to test logging in to MySQL as this new user. 7. In a browser, navigate to the StatusNet install script; something like: http://yourserver.example.com/statusnet/install.php Enter the database connection information and your site name. The install program will configure your site and install the initial, almost-empty database. 8. You should now be able to navigate 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 ---------- By default, StatusNet will use URLs that include the main PHP program's name in them. For example, a user's home profile might be found at: http://example.org/statusnet/index.php/statusnet/fred On certain systems that don't support this kind of syntax, they'll look like this: http://example.org/statusnet/index.php?p=statusnet/fred It's possible to configure the software so it looks like this instead: http://example.org/statusnet/fred These "fancy URLs" are more readable and memorable for users. To use fancy URLs, you must either have Apache 2.x with .htaccess enabled and mod_rewrite enabled, -OR- know how to configure "url redirection" in your server. 1. Copy the htaccess.sample file to .htaccess in your StatusNet directory. Note: if you have control of your server's httpd.conf or similar configuration files, it can greatly improve performance to 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 StatusNet installation on your server. Typically this will be the path to your StatusNet 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: http://example.net/statusnet/main/register If you changed your HTTP server configuration, you may need to restart the server first. If it doesn't work, double-check that AllowOverride for the StatusNet directory is 'All' in your Apache configuration file. This is usually /etc/httpd.conf, /etc/apache/httpd.conf, or (on Debian and Ubuntu) /etc/apache2/sites-available/default. See the Apache documentation for .htaccess files for more details: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/howto/htaccess.html Also, check that mod_rewrite is installed and enabled: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_rewrite.html Sphinx ------ To use a Sphinx server to search users and notices, you'll need to enable the SphinxSearch plugin. Add to your config.php: addPlugin('SphinxSearch'); $config['sphinx']['server'] = 'searchhost.local'; 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. See plugins/SphinxSearch/README for more details and server setup. SMS --- StatusNet supports a cheap-and-dirty system for sending update messages to mobile phones and for receiving updates from the mobile. Instead of sending through the SMS network itself, which is costly and requires buy-in from the wireless carriers, it simply piggybacks on the email gateways that many carriers provide to their customers. So, SMS configuration is essentially email configuration. Each user sends to a made-up email address, which they keep a secret. Incoming email that is "From" the user's SMS email address, and "To" the users' secret email address on the site's domain, will be converted to a notice and stored in the DB. For this to work, there *must* be a domain or sub-domain for which all (or most) incoming email can pass through the incoming mail filter. 1. Run the SQL script carrier.sql in your StatusNet database. This will usually work: mysql -u "statusnetuser" --password="statusnetpassword" statusnet < db/carrier.sql This will populate your database with a list of wireless carriers that support email SMS gateways. 2. Make sure the maildaemon.php file is executable: 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/statusnet/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 StatusNet, a working config.php, and access to the StatusNet database from the mail server. XMPP ---- XMPP (eXtended Message and Presence Protocol, ) is the instant-messenger protocol that drives Jabber and GTalk IM. You can distribute messages via XMPP using the system below; however, you need to run the XMPP incoming daemon to allow incoming messages as well. 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. StatusNet 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 to set that up. Also, once you have a sizable number of users, sending a lot of SMS, OMB, and XMPP messages whenever someone posts a message can really slow down your site; it may cause posting to timeout. NOTE: stream_select(), a crucial function for network programming, is broken on PHP 5.2.x less than 5.2.6 on amd64-based servers. We don't work around this bug in StatusNet; current recommendation is to move off of amd64 to another server. Public feed ----------- You can send *all* messages from your microblogging site to a third-party service using XMPP. This can be useful for providing search, indexing, bridging, or other cool services. To configure a downstream site to receive your public stream, add 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 consider setting up queues and daemons. Queues and daemons ------------------ Some activities that StatusNet needs to do, like broadcast OMB, SMS, and XMPP messages, can be 'queued' and done by off-line bots instead. For this to work, you must be able to run long-running offline processes, either on your main Web server or on another server you control. (Your other server will still need all the above prerequisites, with the exception of Apache.) Installing on a separate server is probably a good idea for high-volume sites. 1. You'll need the "CLI" (command-line interface) version of PHP installed on whatever server you use. 2. If you're using a separate server for queues, install StatusNet somewhere on the server. You don't need to worry about the .htaccess file, but make sure that your config.php file is close to, or identical to, your Web server's version. 3. In your config.php files (both the Web server and the queues 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 StatusNet dir, "." should suffice. This will run the queue handlers: * queuedaemon.php - polls for queued items for inbox processing and pushing out to OMB, SMS, XMPP, etc. * xmppdaemon.php - listens for new XMPP messages from users and stores them as notices in the database; also pulls queued XMPP output from queuedaemon.php to push out to clients. These two daemons will automatically restart in most cases of failure including memory leaks (if a memory_limit is set), but may still die or behave oddly if they lose connections to the XMPP or queue servers. It may be a good idea to use a daemon-monitoring service, like 'monit', to check their status and keep them running. All the daemons write their process IDs (pids) to /var/run/ by default. This can be useful for starting, stopping, and monitoring the daemons. Since version 0.8.0, it's now possible to use a STOMP server instead of our kind of hacky home-grown DB-based queue solution. See the "queues" config section below for how to configure to use STOMP. As of this writing, the software has been tested with ActiveMQ. Themes ------ There are two themes shipped with this version of StatusNet: "identica", which is what the Identi.ca site uses, and "default", which is a good basis for other sites. As of right now, your ability to change the theme is site-wide; users can't choose their own theme. Additionally, the only thing you can change in the theme is CSS stylesheets and some image files; you can't change the HTML output, like adding or removing menu items. You can choose a theme using the $config['site']['theme'] element in the config.php file. See below for details. You can add your own theme by making a sub-directory of the 'theme' subdirectory with the name of your theme. Each theme can have the following files: display.css: a CSS2 file for "default" styling for all browsers. ie6.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet Explorer 6. ie7.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet Explorer 7. logo.png: a logo image for the site. default-avatar-profile.png: a 96x96 pixel image to use as the avatar for users who don't upload their own. default-avatar-stream.png: Ditto, but 48x48. For streams of notices. default-avatar-mini.png: Ditto ditto, but 24x24. For subscriptions listing on profile pages. You may want to start by copying the files from the default theme to your own directory. NOTE: the HTML generated by StatusNet changed *radically* between version 0.6.x and 0.7.x. Older themes will need signification modification to use the new output format. Translation ----------- Translations in StatusNet use the gettext system . Theoretically, you can add your own sub-directory to the locale/ 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 StatusNet are very easy: you can use the Web interface at TranslateWiki.net 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. For info on helping with translations, see http://status.net/wiki/Translations Backups ------- There is no built-in system for doing backups in StatusNet. You can make backups of a working StatusNet system by backing up the database and the Web directory. To backup the database use mysqldump 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. 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. The interaction of private sites with OStatus is undefined. Access to file attachments can also be restricted to logged-in users only. 1. Add a directory outside the web root where your file uploads will be stored. Usually a command like this will work: mkdir /var/www/statusnet-files 2. Make the file uploads directory writeable by the web server. An insecure way to do this is: chmod a+x /var/www/statusnet-files 3. Tell StatusNet to use this directory for file uploads. Add a line like this to your config.php: $config['attachments']['dir'] = '/var/www/statusnet-files'; Upgrading ========= IMPORTANT NOTE: StatusNet 0.7.4 introduced a fix for some incorrectly-stored international characters ("UTF-8"). For new installations, it will now store non-ASCII characters correctly. However, older installations will have the incorrect storage, and will consequently show up "wrong" in browsers. See below for how to deal with this situation. If you've been using StatusNet 0.7, 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 StatusNet 0.9.0. Try these step-by-step instructions; read to the end first before trying them. 0. Download StatusNet and set up all the prerequisites as if you were doing a new install. 1. Make backups of both your database and your Web directory. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES should you try to do an upgrade without a known-good backup. You have been warned. 2. Shut down Web access to your site, either by turning off your Web server or by redirecting all pages to a "sorry, under maintenance" page. 3. Shut down XMPP access to your site, typically by shutting down the xmppdaemon.php process and all other daemons that you're running. If you've got "monit" or "cron" automatically restarting your daemons, make sure to turn that off, too. 4. Shut down SMS and email access to your site. The easy way to do this is to comment out the line piping incoming email to your maildaemon.php file, and running something like "newaliases". 5. Once all writing processes to your site are turned off, make a final backup of the Web directory and database. 6. Move your StatusNet directory to a backup spot, like "statusnet.bak". 7. Unpack your StatusNet 0.9.0 tarball and move it to "statusnet" or wherever your code used to be. 8. Copy the config.php file and avatar directory from your old directory to your new directory. 9. Copy htaccess.sample to .htaccess in the new directory. Change the RewriteBase to use the correct path. 10. Rebuild the database. (You can safely skip this step and go to #12 if you're upgrading from another 0.8.x version). NOTE: this step is destructive and cannot be reversed. YOU CAN EASILY DESTROY YOUR SITE WITH THIS STEP. Don't do it without a known-good backup! If your database is at version 0.8.0 or above, you can run a special upgrade script: mysql -u -p db/08to09.sql Otherwise, go to your StatusNet directory and AFTER YOU MAKE A BACKUP run the rebuilddb.sh script like this: ./scripts/rebuilddb.sh rootuser rootpassword database db/statusnet.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 StatusNet runs as. Note that rebuilddb.sh drops your database and rebuilds it; if there is an error you have no database. Make sure you have a backup. For PostgreSQL databases there is an equivalent, rebuilddb_psql.sh, which operates slightly differently. Read the documentation in that script before running it. 11. Use mysql or psql client to log into your database and make sure that the notice, user, profile, subscription etc. tables are non-empty. 12. Turn back on the Web server, and check that things still work. 13. Turn back on XMPP bots and email maildaemon. Note that the XMPP bots have changed since version 0.5; see above for details. 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. All upgraders should check out the inboxes options below. NOTE: the database definition file, laconica.ini, has been renamed to statusnet.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 -------------- Notice inboxes are now required. If you don't have inboxes enabled, StatusNet will no longer run. UTF-8 Database -------------- StatusNet 0.7.4 introduced a fix for some incorrectly-stored international characters ("UTF-8"). This fix is not backwards-compatible; installations from before 0.7.4 will show non-ASCII characters of old notices incorrectly. This section explains what to do. 0. You can disable the new behaviour by setting the 'db''utf8' config option to "false". You should only do this until you're ready to convert your DB to the new format. 1. When you're ready to convert, you can run the fixup_utf8.php script in the scripts/ subdirectory. If you've had the "new behaviour" enabled (probably a good idea), you can give the ID of the first "new" notice as a parameter, and only notices before that one will be converted. Notices are converted in reverse chronological order, so the most recent (and visible) ones will be converted first. The script should work whether or not you have the 'db''utf8' config option enabled. 2. When you're ready, set $config['db']['utf8'] to true, so that new notices will be stored correctly. Configuration options ===================== The main configuration file for StatusNet (excepting configurations for dependency software) is config.php in your StatusNet directory. If you edit any other file in the directory, like lib/default.php (where most of the defaults are defined), you will lose your configuration options in any upgrade, and you will wish that you had been more careful. Starting with version 0.9.0, a Web based configuration panel has been added to StatusNet. The preferred method for changing config options is to use this panel. A command-line script, setconfig.php, can be used to set individual configuration options. It's in the scripts/ directory. Starting with version 0.7.1, you can put config files in the /etc/statusnet/ directory on your server, if it exists. Config files will be included in this order: * /etc/statusnet/statusnet.php - server-wide config * /etc/statusnet/.php - for a virtual host * /etc/statusnet/_.php - for a path * INSTALLDIR/config.php - for a particular implementation Almost all configuration options are made through a two-dimensional associative array, cleverly named $config. A typical configuration line will be: $config['section']['option'] = value; For brevity, the following documentation describes each section and option. site ---- This section is a catch-all for site-wide variables. name: the name of your site, like 'YourCompany Microblog'. server: the server part of your site's URLs, like 'example.net'. path: The path part of your site's URLs, like 'statusnet' or '' (installed in root). fancy: whether or not your site uses fancy URLs (see Fancy URLs section above). Default is false. logfile: full path to a file for StatusNet to save logging information to. You may want to use this if you don't have access to syslog. logdebug: whether to log additional debug info like backtraces on hard errors. Default false. locale_path: full path to the directory for locale data. Unless you store all your locale data in one place, you probably don't need to use this. language: default language for your site. Defaults to US English. Note that this is overridden if a user is logged in and has selected a different language. It is also overridden if the user is NOT logged in, but their browser requests a different langauge. Since pretty much everybody's browser requests a language, that means that changing this setting has little or no effect in practice. languages: A list of languages supported on your site. Typically you'd only change this if you wanted to disable support for one or another language: "unset($config['site']['languages']['de'])" will disable support for German. theme: Theme for your site (see Theme section). Two themes are provided by default: 'default' and 'stoica' (the one used by Identi.ca). It's appreciated if you don't use the 'stoica' theme except as the basis for your own. email: contact email address for your site. By default, it's extracted from your Web server environment; you may want to customize it. broughtbyurl: name of an organization or individual who provides the service. Each page will include a link to this name in the footer. A good way to link to the blog, forum, wiki, corporate portal, or whoever is making the service available. broughtby: text used for the "brought by" link. timezone: default timezone for message display. Users can set their own time zone. Defaults to 'UTC', which is a pretty good default. closed: If set to 'true', will disallow registration on your site. 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. notice: A plain string that will appear on every page. A good place to put introductory information about your service, or info about upgrades and outages, or other community info. Any HTML will be escaped. logo: URL of an image file to use as the logo for the site. Overrides the logo in the theme, if any. ssl: Whether to use SSL and https:// URLs for some or all pages. Possible values are 'always' (use it for all pages), 'never' (don't use it for any pages), or 'sometimes' (use it for sensitive pages that include passwords like login and registration, but not for regular pages). Default to 'never'. sslserver: use an alternate server name for SSL URLs, like 'secure.example.org'. You should be careful to set cookie parameters correctly so that both the SSL server and the "normal" server can access the session cookie and preferably other cookies as well. shorturllength: Length of URL at which URLs in a message exceeding 140 characters will be sent to the user's chosen shortening service. dupelimit: minimum time allowed for one person to say the same thing twice. Default 60s. Anything lower is considered a user or UI error. textlimit: default max size for texts in the site. Defaults to 140. 0 means no limit. Can be fine-tuned for notices, messages, profile bios and group descriptions. db -- This section is a reference to the configuration options for DB_DataObject (see ). The ones that you may want to set are listed below for clarity. database: a DSN (Data Source Name) for your StatusNet 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 'statusnet', you'll need to set this to point to the location of the statusnet.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. utf8: whether to talk to the database in UTF-8 mode. This is the default with new installations, but older sites may want to turn it off until they get their databases fixed up. See "UTF-8 database" above for details. schemacheck: when to let plugins check the database schema to add tables or update them. Values can be 'runtime' (default) or 'script'. 'runtime' can be costly (plugins check the schema on every hit, adding potentially several db queries, some quite long), but not everyone knows how to run a script. If you can, set this to 'script' and run scripts/checkschema.php whenever you install or upgrade a plugin. syslog ------ By default, StatusNet sites log error messages to the syslog facility. (You can override this using the 'logfile' parameter described above). appname: The name that StatusNet uses to log messages. By default it's "statusnet", but if you have more than one installation on the server, you may want to change the name for each instance so you can track log messages more easily. priority: level to log at. Currently ignored. facility: what syslog facility to used. Defaults to LOG_USER, only reset if you know what syslog is and have a good reason to change it. queue ----- You can configure the software to queue time-consuming tasks, like sending out SMS email or XMPP messages, for off-line processing. See 'Queues and daemons' above for how to set this up. enabled: Whether to uses queues. Defaults to false. subsystem: Which kind of queueserver to use. Values include "db" for our hacked-together database queuing (no other server required) and "stomp" for a stomp server. stomp_server: "broker URI" for stomp server. Something like "tcp://hostname:61613". More complicated ones are possible; see your stomp server's documentation for details. queue_basename: a root name to use for queues (stomp only). Typically something like '/queue/sitename/' makes sense. stomp_username: username for connecting to the stomp server; defaults to null. stomp_password: password for connecting to the stomp server; defaults to null. license ------- The default license to use for your users notices. The default is the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which is probably the right choice for any public site. Note that some other servers will not accept notices if you apply a stricter license than this. type: one of 'cc' (for Creative Commons licenses), 'allrightsreserved' (default copyright), or 'private' (for private and confidential information). owner: for 'allrightsreserved' or 'private', an assigned copyright holder (for example, an employer for a private site). If not specified, will be attributed to 'contributors'. url: URL of the license, used for links. title: Title for the license, like 'Creative Commons Attribution 3.0'. image: A button shown on each page for the license. mail ---- This is for configuring out-going email. We use PEAR's Mail module, see: http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.mail.mail.factory.php backend: the backend to use for mail, one of 'mail', 'sendmail', and 'smtp'. Defaults to PEAR's default, 'mail'. params: if the mail backend requires any parameters, you can provide them in an associative array. nickname -------- This is for configuring nicknames in the service. blacklist: an array of strings for usernames that may not be registered. A default array exists for strings that are used by StatusNet (e.g. 'doc', 'main', 'avatar', 'theme') but you may want to add others if you have other software installed in a subdirectory of StatusNet 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 ------ For configuring avatar access. dir: Directory to look for avatar files and to put them into. Defaults to avatar subdirectory of install directory; if you change it, make sure to change path, too. path: Path to avatars. Defaults to path for avatar subdirectory, but you can change it if you wish. Note that this will be included with the avatar server, too. server: If set, defines another server where avatars are stored in the root directory. Note that the 'avatar' subdir still has to be writeable. You'd typically use this to split HTTP requests on the client to speed up page loading, either with another virtual server or with an NFS or SAMBA share. Clients typically only make 2 connections to a single server at a time , so this can parallelize the job. Defaults to null. ssl: Whether to access avatars using HTTPS. Defaults to null, meaning to guess based on site-wide SSL settings. public ------ For configuring the public stream. 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. autosource: Sources of notices that are from automatic posters, and thus should be kept off the public timeline. Default empty. theme ----- server: Like avatars, you can speed up page loading by pointing the theme file lookup to another server (virtual or real). Defaults to NULL, meaning to use the site server. dir: Directory where theme files are stored. Used to determine whether to show parts of a theme file. Defaults to the theme subdirectory of the install directory. path: Path part of theme URLs, before the theme name. Relative to the theme server. It may make sense to change this path when upgrading, (using version numbers as the path) to make sure that all files are reloaded by caching clients or proxies. Defaults to null, which means to use the site path + '/theme'. ssl: Whether to use SSL for theme elements. Default is null, which means guess based on site SSL settings. javascript ---------- server: You can speed up page loading by pointing the theme file lookup to another server (virtual or real). Defaults to NULL, meaning to use the site server. path: Path part of Javascript URLs. Defaults to null, which means to use the site path + '/js/'. ssl: Whether to use SSL for JavaScript files. Default is null, which means guess based on site SSL settings. xmpp ---- For configuring the XMPP sub-system. enabled: Whether to accept and send messages by XMPP. Default false. server: server part of XMPP ID for update user. port: connection port for clients. Default 5222, which you probably shouldn't need to change. user: username for the client connection. Users will receive messages from 'user'@'server'. resource: a unique identifier for the connection to the server. This is actually used as a prefix for each XMPP component in the system. password: password for the user account. host: some XMPP domains are served by machines with a different hostname. (For example, @gmail.com GTalk users connect to talk.google.com). Set this to the correct hostname if that's the case with your server. encryption: Whether to encrypt the connection between StatusNet and the XMPP server. Defaults to true, but you can get considerably better performance turning it off if you're connecting to a server on the same machine or on a protected network. debug: if turned on, this will make the XMPP library blurt out all of the incoming and outgoing messages as XML stanzas. Use as a last resort, and never turn it on if you don't have queues enabled, since it will spit out sensitive data to the browser. public: an array of JIDs to send _all_ notices to. This is useful for participating in third-party search and archiving services. invite ------ For configuring invites. enabled: Whether to allow users to send invites. Default true. tag --- Miscellaneous tagging stuff. 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. popular ------- Settings for the "popular" section of the site. dropoff: Decay factor for popularity 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 ------ For daemon processes. piddir: directory that daemon processes should write their PID file (process ID) to. Defaults to /var/run/, which is where this stuff should usually go on Unix-ish systems. user: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective user ID to this user before running. Probably a good idea, especially if you start the daemons as root. Note: user name, like 'daemon', not 1001. 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 . 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. base: memcached uses key-value pairs to store data. We build long, funny-looking keys to make sure we don't have any conflicts. The base of the key is usually a simplified version of the site name (like "Identi.ca" => "identica"), but you can overwrite this if you need to. You can safely ignore it if you only have one StatusNet site using your memcached server. port: Port to connect to; defaults to 11211. emailpost --------- For post-by-email. enabled: Whether to enable post-by-email. Defaults to true. You will also need to set up maildaemon.php. sms --- For SMS integration. enabled: Whether to enable SMS integration. Defaults to true. Queues should also be enabled. integration ----------- A catch-all for integration with other systems. taguri: base for tag:// URIs. Defaults to site-server + ',2009'. inboxes ------- For notice inboxes. enabled: No longer used. If you set this to something other than true, StatusNet will no longer run. 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. biolimit: max character length of bio; 0 means no limit; null means to use the site text limit default. newuser ------- Options with new users. default: nickname of a user account to automatically subscribe new users to. Typically this would be system account for e.g. service updates or announcements. Users are able to unsub if they want. Default is null; no auto subscribe. welcome: nickname of a user account that sends welcome messages to new users. Can be the same as 'default' account, although on busy servers it may be a good idea to keep that one just for 'urgent' messages. Default is null; no message. If either of these special user accounts are specified, the users should be created before the configuration is updated. snapshot -------- The software will, by default, send statistical snapshots about the local installation to a stats server on the status.net Web site. This data is used by the developers to prioritize development decisions. No identifying data about users or organizations is collected. The data is available to the public for review. Participating in this survey helps StatusNet developers take your needs into account when updating the software. run: string indicating when to run the statistics. Values can be 'web' (run occasionally at Web time), 'cron' (run from a cron script), or 'never' (don't ever run). If you set it to 'cron', remember to schedule the script to run on a regular basis. frequency: if run value is 'web', how often to report statistics. Measured in Web hits; depends on how active your site is. Default is 10000 -- that is, one report every 10000 Web hits, on average. reporturl: URL to post statistics to. Defaults to StatusNet developers' report system, but if they go evil or disappear you may need to update this to another value. Note: if you don't want to report stats, it's much better to set 'run' to 'never' than to set this value to something nonsensical. attachments ----------- The software lets users upload files with their notices. You can configure the types of accepted files by mime types and a trio of quota options: per file, per user (total), per user per month. We suggest the use of the pecl file_info extension to handle mime type detection. supported: an array of mime types you accept to store and distribute, like 'image/gif', 'video/mpeg', 'audio/mpeg', etc. Make sure you setup your server to properly recognize the types you want to support. uploads: false to disable uploading files with notices (true by default). filecommand: The required MIME_Type library may need to use the 'file' command. It tries the one in the Web server's path, but if you're having problems with uploads, try setting this to the correct value. Note: 'file' must accept '-b' and '-i' options. For quotas, be sure you've set the upload_max_filesize and post_max_size in php.ini to be large enough to handle your upload. In httpd.conf (if you're using apache), check that the LimitRequestBody directive isn't set too low (it's optional, so it may not be there at all). file_quota: maximum size for a single file upload in bytes. A user can send any amount of notices with attachments as long as each attachment is smaller than file_quota. user_quota: total size in bytes a user can store on this server. Each user can store any number of files as long as their total size does not exceed the user_quota. monthly_quota: total size permitted in the current month. This is the total size in bytes that a user can upload each month. dir: directory accessible to the Web process where uploads should go. Defaults to the 'file' subdirectory of the install directory, which should be writeable by the Web user. server: server name to use when creating URLs for uploaded files. Defaults to null, meaning to use the default Web server. Using a virtual server here can speed up Web performance. path: URL path, relative to the server, to find files. Defaults to main path + '/file/'. ssl: whether to use HTTPS for file URLs. Defaults to null, meaning to guess based on other SSL settings. filecommand: command to use for determining the type of a file. May be skipped if fileinfo extension is installed. Defaults to '/usr/bin/file'. group ----- Options for group functionality. maxaliases: maximum number of aliases a group can have. Default 3. Set to 0 or less to prevent aliases in a group. desclimit: maximum number of characters to allow in group descriptions. null (default) means to use the site-wide text limits. 0 means no limit. oohembed -------- oEmbed endpoint for multimedia attachments (links in posts). endpoint: oohembed endpoint using http://oohembed.com/ software. search ------ Some stuff for search. type: type of search. Ignored if PostgreSQL or Sphinx are enabled. Can either be 'fulltext' (default) or 'like'. The former is faster and more efficient but requires the lame old MyISAM engine for MySQL. The latter will work with InnoDB but could be miserably slow on large systems. We'll probably add another type sometime in the future, with our own indexing system (maybe like MediaWiki's). sessions -------- Session handling. handle: boolean. Whether we should register our own PHP session-handling code (using the database and memcache if enabled). Defaults to false. Setting this to true makes some sense on large or multi-server sites, but it probably won't hurt for smaller ones, either. debug: whether to output debugging info for session storage. Can help with weird session bugs, sometimes. Default false. background ---------- Users can upload backgrounds for their pages; this section defines their use. server: the server to use for background. Using a separate (even virtual) server for this can speed up load times. Default is null; same as site server. dir: directory to write backgrounds too. Default is '/background/' subdir of install dir. path: path to backgrounds. Default is sub-path of install path; note that you may need to change this if you change site-path too. ssl: Whether or not to use HTTPS for background files. Defaults to null, meaning to guess from site-wide SSL settings. ping ---- Using the "XML-RPC Ping" method initiated by weblogs.com, the site can notify third-party servers of updates. notify: an array of URLs for ping endpoints. Default is the empty array (no notification). design ------ Default design (colors and background) for the site. Actual appearance depends on the theme. Null values mean to use the theme defaults. backgroundcolor: Hex color of the site background. contentcolor: Hex color of the content area background. sidebarcolor: Hex color of the sidebar background. textcolor: Hex color of all non-link text. linkcolor: Hex color of all links. backgroundimage: Image to use for the background. disposition: Flags for whether or not to tile the background image. notice ------ Configuration options specific to notices. contentlimit: max length of the plain-text content of a notice. Default is null, meaning to use the site-wide text limit. 0 means no limit. message ------- Configuration options specific to messages. contentlimit: max length of the plain-text content of a message. Default is null, meaning to use the site-wide text limit. 0 means no limit. logincommand ------------ Configuration options for the login command. disabled: whether to enable this command. If enabled, users who send the text 'login' to the site through any channel will receive a link to login to the site automatically in return. Possibly useful for users who primarily use an XMPP or SMS interface and can't be bothered to remember their site password. Note that the security implications of this are pretty serious and have not been thoroughly tested. You should enable it only after you've convinced yourself that it is safe. Default is 'false'. singleuser ---------- If an installation has only one user, this can simplify a lot of the interface. It also makes the user's profile the root URL. enabled: Whether to run in "single user mode". Default false. nickname: nickname of the single user. robotstxt --------- We put out a default robots.txt file to guide the processing of Web crawlers. See http://www.robotstxt.org/ for more information on the format of this file. crawldelay: if non-empty, this value is provided as the Crawl-Delay: for the robots.txt file. see http://ur1.ca/l5a0 for more information. Default is zero, no explicit delay. disallow: Array of (virtual) directories to disallow. Default is 'main', 'search', 'message', 'settings', 'admin'. Ignored when site is private, in which case the entire site ('/') is disallowed. Plugins ======= Beginning with the 0.7.x branch, StatusNet has supported a simple but powerful plugin architecture. Important events in the code are named, like 'StartNoticeSave', and other software can register interest in those events. When the events happen, the other software is called and has a choice of accepting or rejecting the events. In the simplest case, you can add a function to config.php and use the Event::addHandler() function to hook an event: function AddGoogleLink($action) { $action->menuItem('http://www.google.com/', _('Google'), _('Search engine')); return true; } Event::addHandler('EndPrimaryNav', 'AddGoogleLink'); This adds a menu item to the end of the main navigation menu. You can see the list of existing events, and parameters that handlers must implement, in EVENTS.txt. The Plugin class in lib/plugin.php makes it easier to write more complex plugins. Sub-classes can just create methods named 'onEventName', where 'EventName' is the name of the event (case matters!). These methods will be automatically registered as event handlers by the Plugin constructor (which you must call from your own class's constructor). Several example plugins are included in the plugins/ directory. You can enable a plugin with the following line in config.php: addPlugin('Example', array('param1' => 'value1', 'param2' => 'value2')); This will look for and load files named 'ExamplePlugin.php' or 'Example/ExamplePlugin.php' either in the plugins/ directory (for plugins that ship with StatusNet) or in the local/ directory (for plugins you write yourself or that you get from somewhere else) or local/plugins/. Plugins are documented in their own directories. Troubleshooting =============== The primary output for StatusNet is syslog, unless you configured a separate logfile. This is probably the first place to look if you're getting weird behaviour from StatusNet. If you're tracking the unstable version of StatusNet 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 StatusNet 0.9.0 without reading the "Notice inboxes" section above, and all your users' 'Personal' tabs are empty, read the "Notice inboxes" section above. Myths ===== These are some myths you may see on the Web about StatusNet. Documentation from the core team about StatusNet has been pretty sparse, so some backtracking and guesswork resulted in some incorrect assumptions. - "Set $config['db']['debug'] = 5 to debug the database." This is an extremely bad idea. It's a tool built into DB_DataObject that will 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 StatusNet distribution because its presence was confusing. Do not bother configuring dataobject.ini, and do not put your database username and password into the file on a production Web server; unscrupulous persons may try to read it to get your passwords. Unstable version ================ If you're adventurous or impatient, you may want to install the development version of StatusNet. To get it, use the git version control tool like so: git clone git@gitorious.org:statusnet/mainline.git This is the version of the software that runs on Identi.ca and the status.net hosted service. Using it is a mixed bag. On the positive side, it usually includes the latest security and bug fix patches. On the downside, it may also include changes that require admin intervention (like running a script or even raw SQL!) that may not be documented yet. It may be a good idea to test this version before installing it on your production machines. To keep it up-to-date, use 'git pull'. Watch for conflicts! Further information =================== There are several ways to get more information about StatusNet. * There is a mailing list for StatusNet developers and admins at http://mail.status.net/mailman/listinfo/statusnet-dev * The #statusnet IRC channel on freenode.net . * The StatusNet wiki, http://status.net/wiki/ * The StatusNet blog, http://status.net/blog/ * The StatusNet status update, (!) Feedback ======== * Microblogging messages to http://support.status.net/ are very welcome. * The microblogging group http://identi.ca/group/statusnet is a good place to discuss the software. * StatusNet's Trac server has a bug tracker for any defects you may find, or ideas for making things better. http://status.net/trac/ Credits ======= The following is an incomplete list of developers who've worked on StatusNet. Apologies for any oversight; please let evan@status.net know if anyone's been overlooked in error. * Evan Prodromou, founder and lead developer, StatusNet, Inc. * Zach Copley, StatusNet, Inc. * Earle Martin, StatusNet, Inc. * Marie-Claude Doyon, designer, StatusNet, Inc. * Sarven Capadisli, StatusNet, Inc. * Robin Millette, StatusNet, Inc. * Ciaran Gultnieks * Michael Landers * Ori Avtalion * Garret Buell * Mike Cochrane * Matthew Gregg * Florian Biree * Erik Stambaugh * 'drry' * Gina Haeussge * Tryggvi Björgvinsson * Adrian Lang * Ori Avtalion * Meitar Moscovitz * Ken Sheppardson (Trac server, man-about-town) * Tiago 'gouki' Faria (i18n manager) * Sean Murphy * Leslie Michael Orchard * Eric Helgeson * Ken Sedgwick * Brian Hendrickson * Tobias Diekershoff * Dan Moore * Fil * Jeff Mitchell * Brenda Wallace * Jeffery To * Federico Marani * Craig Andrews * mEDI * Brett Taylor * Brigitte Schuster Thanks also to the developers of our upstream library code and to the thousands of people who have tried out Identi.ca, installed StatusNet, told their friends, and built the Open Microblogging network to what it is today.