Installation & Security HOWTO
Setup and configuration
Now open the setup app in a browser. It is required that you have cookies enabled on your browser to login to setup. Later on you will have the option of not using cookies for your phpgw installation, but the setup process always requires cookies. In my case, since I installed to my home dir, it's http://server/~chris/phpgroupware/setup/. Make sure it says support is enabled for your database. If it's not, then you have not installed/enabled support for your database in your php. Setup will try and guess some good defaults for your setup. You should verify each one, especially the database name and user. If you don't know what an item affects, the default is fine. The "Admin Password" will be used to get back into this header manager, and the "Configuration Password" will be used to get into the other config options and to install applications. After writing your header you are logged out.
Next login to Setup/Config Admin with the password you defined in the Header. This stage of Setup has 4 basic steps, the status of each step can be a little misleading, but more on that later. You should have a message saying "Your database is working, but you don't have any applications installed" and an Install button. If not, then something is wrong with your database or the database user permissions.
Click Install and with any luck you will not get any errors. Errors at this stage will also typically be the fault of the database server in some way. If you need to fix something and try again it's recommended to drop any and all the tables from the database, but not the database itself. Once it's all ok, click the Recheck button. You will be told everything is done, but only defaults are in and not all defaults are good so lets check them.
In Step 2, edit the configuration. Do no yet create the Admin and demo accounts, we'll do that later. These are the options you need to check, the rest are optional or the defaults are fine or recommended.
- You will need to set a tmp path, "/tmp" is usually good enough, but it can be anywhere that is writable by apache/IIS.
- You need to set the full path to your files directory.
- For the URL, it is recommended that you don't include the server name or http:// because some apps and some configurations have a problem with this, so for mine it's "/~chris/phpgroupware". Do not ever include the "index.php" or "login.php" in this URL!
- Setup should fill in your servers host name for you, you can change it to your web sites name if you are using a vhost.
- If you enabled mcrypt in the header, set your preferences for it.
- Give your site a name to show in the title
- If you plan on having AOL, or any Australian users access the site or your clients are behind a transparent proxy pool you will need to set "check ip address of all sessions:" to No. You will know you need this if they consistantly get "session could not be verifed" messages when their login works fine over the LAN.
In Step 3, only English/US translations are installed by default. Select any others you want and choose the "Only add new phrases" option and install.
In Step4 we install the applications. The way phpgw works, all sections such as the calendar and addressbook are separate applications. You can have as many or as few as you want installed and you can choose which users get access to what applications. By default, only the phpgwapi is installed. Some applications have dependencies and cannot be installed until those apps are installed. First we will install the apps that most everything depends on, admin, manual, and preferences. Check their boxes in the Install column and click Submit. Do not check everything at once, this will fail most of the time. You will get a status message for each part of the setup and a link at the bottom to Go Back to the list.
Because this is a basic setup HOWTO we are not going to install all the apps. You can come back into setup later and play with the rest on your own. Lets install addressbook, calendar, email, messenger, notes, phpsysinfo, filemanager, and todo. For a description of what each app is good for, see the list on http://apps.phpgroupware.org/. By now all the apps with dependency problems are ready for installation, but I'm going into them. Click Cancel to go back to the main setup screen.
Now we are ready to create the admin and demo accounts. Click where it says. Give your site admin a username, I'm going to use "admin", and a password. You can create the demo accounts if you want, they can always be deleted later. Submit it and logout of setup.