Geeklog Forums

Can anyone enumerate all the directories that Geeklog needs write access in the directory tree?
Geeklog 1.3.5sr1 seems to be running on Agnostic Martyr but I had quite a bit of trouble setting it up. This is a a web hosting environment, without shell access, so I can't do the chown steps in the INSTALL. Thankfully, I can set permissions, so I've been setting permissions to 777 (yikes) for directories as I run into write access problems, but this is not a good way to solve the problem as I'll have to exercise all the features of Geeklog to test the install. That has been my biggest problem, but here's a list of problems I ran into trying to install.

• Downloaded 1.3.5sr1, and opened up index.html in the docs directory. The link entitled "How to install Geeklog" is missing as it references a non-existent INSTALL.html. After doing a search on sourceforge, found out that I should be reading INSTALL in the top level directory. Can someone at least fix the link in the documentation?
• Couldn't unpack the tar-ball in the target directory, because of the web hosting environment absence of a shell. So I FTPed the whole thing into place.
• Ran into the chown problem. I can't do chown's, and I don't know the userid for the web server even if I could do chown's.
• Tried to do the equivalent of the chmod's, but neither the logs or the public_html/backend directories exist. So I created the directories, then changed the permissions to 755. Unfortunately, this turned out to be insufficient because of the inability to do the chown's.
• Edited config.php and lib-common.php, but they want full paths. I didn't know the full path to the installation because of the web hosting environment. It is displayed in the first error message, but I didn't know this yet and almost gave up on Geeklog at this point.
• Brought up install.php, and ran into the absolute path problems, which I fixed now that I knew the path displayed in the errors.
• Install worked okay, then I brought up the site and ran into problems writing to the log directory. Did a chmod 777 on logs which 'fixed' the problem but could have significant security implications.
• Once this was fixed, I ran into the same permission problem writing backend/geeklog.rdf, which is now 777'ed.
• Created an account, and tried to post a photo and got a message that it couldn't write to images/userphotos. So I created the directory (it didn't exist) and chmod'ed it to 777. The account profile then worked.
• Tried to access the site via direct link and got my default index.html page. There is no documentation telling how to make Geeklog the default page. I know this seems trivial, but I had an index.html file which the web server picked up instead of the index.php file. So I deleted index.html and now Geeklog is the default page on the site! yay!

I love Geeklog so far, but this version is not designed for a web hosting environment without shell access. Thanks in advance for any help. Jerry

Hmm, sounds like you had a hard time installing Geeklog. Sorry about that. But some of this was just plain unnecessary ... chown: You don't normally need to do that if you're using a hosting service, since it's done automatically when you are uploading files to your webspace. I guess we should add a note about that ... I have no idea why several directories did not exist for you since they ARE in the tarball. Which software did you use to unpack it? Full paths: Sorry, but this is just something we have to assume people know about when they try to install Geeklog. I would also assume that you find this information in the documentation of your hosting service. chmod: In most cases, it should be enough to chmod 775 (not 755 as you wrote) the logs and the backends directory - and of course the files in those directories (that's what the -R means and it also says that in the INSTALL instructions). The "direct link" issue (index.php vs. index.html) again is something we need to assume people know about. Some people start with empty webspaces ... Your final remark about Geeklog "not being designed for web hosting environments" is an exageration, I think. Granted, the install instructions are a bit shell centric, but if you know how to do chmods in your ftp client that is basically all you need to know. If you think the current installation instructions are insufficient, please feel free to provide a better one (actually, a much more detailed documentation for Geeklog as a whole is in the works, but that will take it's time). After all, lots of people (including yourself) have managed to get Geeklog up and running with the current instructions, so they can't be all that bad ... So while I agree that some details should be added to the installation instructions, I think that basically all the information you need to install Geeklog successfully is indeed there. I assume your posting is the result of you getting somewhat annoyed when things didn't work as smooth as you expected (and I can perfectly understand that). I can only hope you have much more fun with Geeklog now. bye, Dirk

Yes, whew... thanks for reading the whole post :-) I checked the 1.3.5sr1 tar.gz, and you're right it does have the logs and backend directory. I used winzip and never had a problem with it before, so I'm not sure why these files were not extracted. And perhaps I should have said the INSTALL doc was not meant for web hosting environment, Geeklog itself is running fine in this environment. I should write an INSTALL variation while its still fresh on my mind. Thanks, Jerry

Ah, talking about virtual hosting... What if my site isn't inside a home? (like lycos, etc. You don't have public_html dir since your root directory is the root web directory) How i should install geeklog here?

Agnostic is correct... whilst the install docs explicitly state permission levels for /public_html backend and /logs, they haven't been updated to cover /public_html/images/userphotos and ..../article. We should fix it.

Dirk said "I have no idea why several directories did not exist for you since they ARE in the tarball. Which software did you use to unpack it?"

I had the same problem with my installation. The image/userphoto directory was not there when I uploaded it. And it wasn't in the unzipped tar. Can't remember, but I think I used Winzip and WS_FTP. Works fine though when I manually created the dirs.

Incidentally, I just installed Geeklog on Tripod Germany today, just to prove that it is possible :-)

My solution was to create a separate directory geeklog into which I uploaded config.php and all the other stuff. I then secured this directory by using .htaccess and .htpasswd files as explained on the Tripod/Lycos pages.

The site is at http://mitglied.lycos.de/geeklog/ (which doesn't seem to work just now - so much for free hosting ...) and if you try to access the geeklog subdirectory, you will get a prompt asking for a username and password.

Hope that helps.

bye, Dirk

I just checked it again: The images/userphotos directory is indeed contained in the tarball. Maybe some versions of tar (or whatever extractor you were using) do not extract empty directories? bye, Dirk

We have had reports of WinZip not unpacking files correctly. Search for "winzip" and you should find them ... bye, Dirk

Install was great and quite easy. Never had problems with the directories. They were all there. I used WinRAR 2.80 and CuteFTP Pro to upload. Though it took a while coz i don't have TelNet access. It's okay coz it's all worth it. Great work there! Luigi MD

Works now, but it is slooooow. 7.51 secs to serve the frontpage. Hardly recommended for hosting a Geeklog site. /Jens

tell me how to install on lycos.co.uk i got the error that says php.ini is not set to global etc etc.. but i keep going to step 3.. just when the success page was loading.. the page was redirected to lycos.co.uk homepage.. tell me how u do it? plizzzzzzz

The redirect was probably because you didn't set $_CONF['site_url'] correctly (I assume you got to a Lycos page telling you that the success page could not be found). However, if the install script tells you that register_globals is off, then you do have a problem. Geeklog requires that register_globals is on, there's no way around that. Some things will work when it's off (e.g. the install script and you will be able to log into your site) but you won't be able to post any stories ... bye, Dirk

There is a problem on Geeklog testing if register_globals are on or not at Lycos. As in the install it said that it was off, in the info (info.php executed at server) it said they are on. So... I couldn't install Geeklog at Lycos.fr so I choose to install Xoops (www.xoops.org) and it is running quite well (and it also requires to have globals on). I hope to use Geeklog in the future but not for now... I'm so newbee to star changing lot of things in paths. It's a pity, as Geeklog is one of the best choices as I tried it at my local computer (using EasyPHP), running on Win98.