The following manual installation method is intended for more experienced system administrators, and assumes that you have sudo or root powers on the target server. If ready-made packages of Newscoop are not available for your GNU/Linux distribution of choice, you can install the software manually using the tarball available for download from Sourcefabric:
http://newscoop.sourcefabric.org/
Before performing a manual installation, you will have to verify that all of the dependency packages that Newscoop requires are already installed and working. These dependencies are:
1. Apache web server (http://www.apache.org) version 2.0.x or newer.
On Debian or Ubuntu GNU/Linux, you can install the apache2 metapackage, which will install all of the web server packages you need.
sudo apt-get install apache2
On Red Hat Enterprise, you can install Apache using the httpd package and configure it to start on boot with these commands (as root):
yum install httpd chkconfig --levels 235 httpd on service httpd start
2. MySQL database management system (http://www.mysql.com) version 5.0 or newer. See the chapter MySQL installation for details.
3. PHP scripting language (http://www.php.net) version 5.3 or newer.
The following PHP modules must be installed:
These modules have the same names in the equivalent Debian/Ubuntu packages, which you can install with the command:
sudo apt-get install php5-cli php5-mysql php5-gd
On Red Hat Enterprise, you can install these packages with:
yum install php php-gd php-mysql
The php-cli package is installed automatically as a dependency of the php package on Red Hat Enterprise.
You will also need the PHP module for the Apache web server, which has the package name libapache2-mod-php5 in Debian/Ubuntu. This package should be installed automatically as a dependency when installing the PHP packages mentioned above.
4. ImageMagick (http://www.imagemagick.org).
Needed for creating thumbnails of images. Available in Debian/Ubuntu's imagemagick package:
sudo apt-get install imagemagick
and in Red Hat Enterprise with:
yum install ImageMagick
All of these Newscoop dependencies are available as standard packages in most GNU/Linux distributions. You should be able to find them using your distribution's software package manager, although the exact package names can vary from the examples given above for Debian/Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise.
An existing Newscoop installation should have a named database already set up on a MySQL server, with access protected by a username and password. For a new installation of Newscoop, you will need to tell the installer to create a database to store your content in. See the chapter MySQL installation for details.
On Debian or Ubuntu, the PHP modules that you have installed should be configured automatically, with an entry for each module added to the /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d/ directory. You can also create your own PHP customization options using files in that directory, which should not be overwritten when the main php.ini file is upgraded. Red Hat Enterprise also sets up these modules automatically.
On other distributions of GNU/Linux, you may need to add a line for each module to the php.ini file, such as /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini or similar. The following extensions should be enabled. If the line is already present but starts with the semi-colon comment ';' you will need to remove this character for the corresponding extension to work.
extension=gd.so extension=mysqli.so extension=mysql.so
On any GNU/Linux distribution, the php.ini file contains some default settings which should be checked or adjusted to enable optimum Newscoop performance and security. You can do this by opening the file in your text editor, such as nano:
sudo nano /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini
This is a long file, so use the search tool in nano (Ctrl+W) to find the lines you want. The recommend settings are that you should:
1. Turn off register_globals because it's a potential security hole:
register_globals = Off
2. Set the amount of memory available to at least 128MB:
memory_limit = 128M
3. Turn off magic quotes:
magic_quotes_gpc = Off
4. Allow HTTP file uploads:
file_uploads = On
The values above are the default settings on Debian or Ubuntu. You may wish to adjust the following two settings, which affect the maximum size of media that Newscoop users can upload.
5. The maximum size of POST data that PHP will accept defaults to 8MB on Debian/Ubuntu. You may find that you need to set this higher, for example:
post_max_size = 100M
6. The maximum allowed size for uploaded files defaults to 2MB on Debian/Ubuntu. This is likely to be insufficient for large multimedia attachments, so you may wish to set this value higher. However, it must not be higher than the maximum POST size set above, otherwise large uploads may fail.
upload_max_filesize = 100M
7. You may also wish to disable automatic session garbage collection, which can cause fatal PHP errors if your server runs Debian or Ubuntu. These GNU/Linux distributions use a cron job /etc/cron.d/php5 to perform garbage collection instead.
session.gc_probability = 0
The Apache web server's configuration will need to be adjusted to set the path to the Newscoop files and templates. On Debian or Ubuntu, Apache configuration files are usually found in the /etc/apache2/sites-available/ directory.
1. Create a file such as newscoop containing a virtual host definition.
sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/newscoop
For a publication with the domain name www.example.com, you could use a virtual host definition like the following for Apache 2.2:
<VirtualHost *:80> DocumentRoot /var/www/newscoop ServerName example.com ServerAlias www.example.com DirectoryIndex index.php index.html <Directory /var/www/newscoop> Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews AllowOverride All Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> </VirtualHost>
If you have Apache 2.4 installed on your server, you will need to replace the lines:
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
with the following line:
Require all granted
Make sure that the DocumentRoot directory that you set in the virtual host definition actually exists, otherwise Apache will complain when it starts up.
$ sudo mkdir -p /var/www/newscoop
If the ServerName or ServerAlias that you are using is not yet set up in DNS for this particular machine's IP address, you can create a temporary hostname in your /etc/hosts/ file which will enable you to test the installation locally.
2. Disable the default Apache configuration, if you aren't using it.
sudo a2dissite default Site default disabled. Run '/etc/init.d/apache2 reload' to activate new configuration!
3. Enable the Newscoop configuration that you just created.
sudo a2ensite newscoop Enabling site newscoop. Run '/etc/init.d/apache2 reload' to activate new configuration!
4. You may also need to enable Apache's rewrite and php5 modules. On Debian/Ubuntu, you can do this with the a2enmod command:
sudo a2enmod rewrite php5
The server should respond:
Enabling module rewrite. Module php5 already enabled Run '/etc/init.d/apache2 restart' to activate new configuration!
5. Restart Apache as suggested by the output of the command above, so that the Newscoop configuration and the new modules can be loaded:
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
The server should respond:
* Restarting web server apache2 [ OK ]
1. Extract the Newscoop tarball that you downloaded in your working directory. This action will generate a directory named newscoop- with a version number suffix. (A beta version may have an additional suffix on the extracted directory, such as -BETA4).
tar -xvzf newscoop-4.2.4.tar.gz
2. Examine the contents of the extracted directory with the ls command.
ls newscoop-4.2.4
The output of this command should appear similar to:
admin-files composer.lock images README.md
admin.php composer.phar include robots.txt
admin-style conf index.php scripts
application constants.php install src
application.php COPYING.txt INSTALL.txt template_engine
attachment.php CREDITS.txt js tests
backup db_connect.php library themes
bin example LICENSE_3RD_PARTY.txt UPGRADE.md
cache extensions log upgrade.php
ChangeLog.txt favicon.ico phpunit.xml vendor
classes get_img.php plugins
composer.json htaccess public
3. Move the contents of the extracted directory into the DocumentRoot directory of the Apache VirtualHost that you set up, such as /var/www/newscoop/
sudo mv newscoop-4.2.4/* /var/www/newscoop/
If you wish to install Newscoop into a subdirectory of the DocumentRoot, for example /var/www/newscoop/subdirectory/ your Newscoop site will be visible at the http://www.example.com/subdirectory/ URL. This method is useful for adding Newscoop to an existing site without changing the contents of the DocumentRoot directory, which might be static pages or other archived content.
4. Change the ownership of the DocumentRoot directory to the username of the web server, for instance www-data on Debian or Ubuntu.
sudo chown -R www-data.www-data /var/www/newscoop/
5. Open a web browser with the URL of the Apache ServerName or ServerAlias that you set up earlier. If you see the Newscoop installer page, you are ready to proceed through the Installation steps chapter.
Some shared hosting servers provide administration tools such as cPanel or vDeck instead of root access in a shell. It is usually possible to install Newscoop on this type of server if you create a MySQL database user and Apache configuration before copying the Newscoop files to the server's web root directory via FTP or SFTP. You would then access the Newscoop installer at the domain name configured in the Apache page of the control panel.
If you cannot access the Newscoop installer page after copying the files to a vDeck server, and you see a 403 Forbidden error instead, you may need to make an adjustment to the server's .htaccess file. Open the .htaccess editor in the vDeck control panel, and set a Default Page instruction to point to the index.php file in the web root directory of your Apache configuration. Then refresh your browser window on the domain name you have configured.
This step is optional, but highly recommended for optimum Newscoop performance. Various PHP cache software is available, but the currently recommended cache software for Newscoop is APC (http://pecl.php.net/package/APC). You should uninstall or disable any other PHP cache that may be present on the server, such as XCache, before installing APC. This is because having multiple caches enabled can cause problems for PHP.
You can remove the XCache package php5-xcache from a Debian or Ubuntu server with the command:
sudo apt-get remove php5-xcache
APC is available in Debian or Ubuntu as the php-apc package. If you already have Apache installed on the server you are going to use for Newscoop, you can install APC and get it working with the following commands:
sudo apt-get install php-apc sudo invoke-rc.d apache2 restart
APC has an administration page, which is not installed by default. If you wish, you can install and configure it with the following commands:
sudo cp /usr/share/doc/php-apc/apc.php /var/lib/newscoop/ sudo nano /var/lib/newscoop/apc.php
You should set an admin password for the apc user on line 42 of the file, such as mynewpassword in this example:
defaults('ADMIN_PASSWORD','mynewpassword');
Save the apc.php file with Ctrl+O and close it with Ctrl+X. Then open a web browser at the apc.php page of your Newscoop server, such as:
http://newscoop.example.com/apc.php
You will then be able to confirm that APC is working, and view some statistics for the cache. The link to log in, which provides access to features such as clearing the APC cache, is in the top right corner of this page.
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