path: root/README

------
README
------

Laconica 0.6.0
12 September 2008

This is the README file for Laconica, 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 Laconica can be found in the
"doc" subdirectory or in the "help" section on-line.

About
=====

Laconica (pronounced "luh-KAWN-ih-kuh") is a Free and Open Source
microblogging platform. It helps people in a community, company or
group to exchange short (140 character) 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, Jaiku, Pownce and Plurk.

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.

Laconica supports an open standard called OpenMicroBlogging
(http://openmicroblogging.org/) that lets users on different Web sites
or in different companies subscribe to each others' notices. It
enables a distributed social network spread all across the Web.

Laconica was originally developed for the Open Software Service,
Identi.ca (http://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 1.0:

      http://www.openknowledge.org/ossd

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
<http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

    IMPORTANT NOTE: The GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) has
    *different requirements* from the "regular" GPL. In particular, if
    you make modifications to the Laconica 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 LACONICA*.

Prerequisites
=============

The following software packages are *required* for this software to
run correctly.

- PHP 5.2.x. 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 Laconica 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.

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.
  
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
- 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 Laconica site unable to send or receive XMPP
  messages.

A design goal of Laconica 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 Laconica 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 laconica-0.6.0.tar.gz
   
   ...which will make a laconica-0.6.0 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 laconica-0.6.0 /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

   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 "avatar" and add the Web server's user to the group.

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.)

5. Run the laconica.sql SQL script in the db subdirectory to create
   the database tables in the database. A typical system would work
   like this:

   	  mysql -u "username" --password="password" laconica < /var/www/mublog/db/laconica.sql

   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.

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
----------

By default, Laconica will have big long sloppy URLs that are hard for
people to remember or use. For example, a user's home profile might be
found at:

    http://example.org/mublog/index.php?action=showstream&nickname=fred

It's possible to configure the software so it looks like this instead:

    http://example.org/mublog/fred

These "fancy URLs" are more readable and memorable for users. To use
fancy URLs, you must either have Apache 2.2.x with .htaccess enabled
and mod_redirect enabled, -OR- know how to configure "url redirection"
in your server.

1. Copy the htaccess.sample file to .htaccess in your Laconica
   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 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:

     http://example.net/mublog/main/register

If you changed your HTTP server configuration, you may need to restart
the server first.

If you have problems with the .htaccess file on versions of Apache
earlier than 2.2.x, try changing the regular expressions in the
htaccess.sample file that use "\w" to just use ".".

SMS
---

Laconica 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 message 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 Laconica database. This will
   usually work:

   	   mysql -u "lacuser" --password="lacpassword" laconica < 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/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
config.php, and access to the Laconica database from the mail server.

XMPP
----

XMPP (eXtended Message and Presence Protocol, http://xmpp.org/) 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.
   
   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
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.

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 Laconica 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 Laconica
   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;
   
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
  them as notices in the database.
* jabberqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
  registered users who should receive them.
* publicqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
  public feed listeners.
* ombqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to OpenMicroBlogging
  recipients on foreign servers.
* smsqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to SMS-over-email addresses
  of registered users.
* xmppconfirmhandler.php - sends confirmation messages to registered
  users.

Note that these queue daemons are pretty raw, and need your care. In
particular, they leak memory, and you may want to restart them on a
regular (daily or so) basis with a cron job. Also, if they lose
the connection to the XMPP server for too long, they'll simply die. 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.

Sitemaps
--------

Sitemap files (http://sitemaps.org/) are a very nice way of telling
search engines and other interested bots what's available on your site
and what's changed recently. You can generate sitemap files for your
Laconica instance.

1. Choose your sitemap URL layout. Laconica creates a number of
   sitemap XML files for different parts of your site. You may want to
   put these in a sub-directory of your Laconica directory to avoid
   clutter. The sitemap index file tells the search engines and other
   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

   Here, index-file-path is the full path to the sitemap index file,
   like './sitemapindex.xml'. sitemap-directory is the directory where
   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:

   Sitemap: /mublog/sitemapindex.xml

This is a good idea for letting *all* Web spiders know about your
sitemap. You can also submit sitemap files to major search engines
using their respective "Webmaster centres"; see sitemaps.org for links
to these resources.

Themes
------

Translation
-----------

Upgrading
=========

Configuration options
=====================

The sole configuration file for Laconica (excepting configurations for
dependency software) is config.php in your Laconica directory. If you
edit any other file in the directory, like lib/common.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.

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 'mublog' 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 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
	     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.
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'.

syslog
------

By default, Laconica sites log error messages to the syslog facility.
(You can override this using the 'logfile' parameter described above).

appname: The name that Laconica uses to log messages. By default it's
	 "laconica", 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.

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 

		'queue' =>
		array('enabled' => false),
		'license' =>
		array('url' => 'http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/',
			  'title' => 'Creative Commons Attribution 3.0',
			  'image' => 'http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/3.0/88x31.png'),
		'mail' =>
		array('backend' => 'mail',
			  'params' => NULL),
		'nickname' =>
		array('blacklist' => array()),
		'avatar' =>
		array('server' => NULL),
		'public' =>
		array('localonly' => true),
		'theme' =>
		array('server' => NULL),
		'xmpp' =>
		array('enabled' => false,
			  'server' => 'INVALID SERVER',
			  'port' => 5222,
			  'user' => 'update',
			  'encryption' => true,
			  'resource' => 'uniquename',
			  'password' => 'blahblahblah',
			  'host' => NULL, # only set if != server
			  'debug' => false, # print extra debug info
			  'public' => array()), # JIDs of users who want to receive the public stream
		'tag' =>
		array('dropoff' => 864000.0),
		'daemon' =>
		array('piddir' => '/var/run',
			  'user' => false,
			  'group' => false)
		);
Web
---

Mail
----

SMS
---

XMPP
----

Troubleshooting
===============

The primary output for 

Myths
=====

These are some myths you may see on the Web about Laconica.
Documentation from the core team about Laconica 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 Laconica
  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.

Further information and Feedback
================================

There are several ways to get more information and 


Credits
=======