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.

3. Create a .htpasswd file for configure

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!