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06 Dec 2010 - Main.ProjectContributor

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Foswiki System Requirements

Low client and server base requirements are core features that keep Foswiki widely deployable, particularly across a range of browser platforms and versions. Many extensions exist which enhance and expand Foswiki's capabilities; they may have additional requirements.

Contents

Server Requirements

Foswiki is written in Perl 5, which is supported on Microsoft Windows as well as Unix and Unix-like systems (including Linux and OSX), on which it uses a number of shell commands and RCS (Revision Control System), a GNU Free Software package. It should be able to run on any server platform that meets the following requirements.

Resource	Required Server Environment
Perl	5.8.8 or higher
RCS (Revision Control System)	5.7 or higher (including GNU `diff`) Optional. Foswiki includes a pure Perl implementation of RCS (RcsLite) that can be used instead, at the cost of performance
GNU diff	GNU diff 2.7 or higher is required when not using the all-Perl RcsLite. Install within the PATH if not included with RCS (check version with `diff -v`) Must be the version used by RCS, to avoid problems with binary attachments - RCS may have hard-coded path to `diff`
Other external programs	`fgrep, egrep`
Cron/scheduler	• Unix: `cron` • Windows: `cron` equivalents <-- SMELL: Macintosh version? -->
Web server	Apache is well supported; for information on other servers, see Foswiki:Support.InstallingOnSpecificPlatforms.

Perl Modules

A complete list of the required and optional Perl modules can be found in lib/DEPENDENCIES.

The following CPAN modules are not shipped with Foswiki. Note that Foswiki extensions may add additional requirements. Modules marked as Required may still be optional if certain default core features are not used.

Module	Required/Optional	Description
CPAN:HTML::Entities	Required	Used for WYSIWYG Editing
CPAN:HTML::Parser	Required	Used for WYSIWYG Editing
CPAN:HTML::Tree	Required	Used by CompareRevisionsAddOn.
CPAN:URI	Required	Used by MailerContrib for email notifications of topic changes.
CPAN:LWP	Required	Used by the Configure Extensions Installer, and for external URL based INCLUDEs
CPAN:version	Required	version >= 0.77 required for module version checks
CPAN:Digest::SHA	Optional	Required to use SHA1 password encoding, since Perl 5.9.3 part of core
CPAN:Digest::SHA1	Optional	Required by the Foswiki PageCaching feature
CPAN:Win32::Console	Optional	May be required for Internationalization on Windows
CPAN:Archive::Tar	Optional	Required by the Extensions Installer in configure if command line tar or unzip is not available, since Perl 5.9.3 part of core.
CPAN:Archive::Zip	Optional	Alternative to Archive::Tar, used by the Extensions Installer if Archive::Tar and command line tar and unzip also unavailable
CPAN:Net::SMTP::SSL	Optional	Required by Net::SMPT to send email over SSL to providers such as gmail.
CPAN:Authen::SASL	Optional	Required by Net::SMTP if email server requires authentication.

Most of them will probably already be available in your installation. You can check version numbers with the configure script, or if you're still trying to get to that point, check from the command line like this:

perl -e 'use FileHandle; print $FileHandle::VERSION."\n"'

For more detailed dependency information, try the script dependencies_installer.pl located in the tools directory, which makes perl module installation easier. Run it with option -h to understand basics. This script requires confirmation before it actually does something.

Specific distribution details

Ubuntu and other Debian derived distributions

Install apache and rcs apt-get install apache2 rcs

Perl Module	Package to install	Notes <-- -->
HTML::Parser	`libhtml-parser-perl`
HTML::Tree	`libhtml-tree-perl`
LWP	`libwww-perl`
Digest::SHA	`libdigest-sha-perl`
Digest::SHA1	`libdigest-sha1-perl`
URI	`liburi-perl`
Net::SMTP::SSL	`libnet-smtp-ssl`
HTML::Entities		included with HTML::Parser
version	`libversion-perl`	Must be version 0.77 or newer
Authen::SASL	`libauthen-sasl`	note, broken on Ubuntu 11.10 x64. Install using CPAN!

After expanding the Foswiki archive, change the ownership of the files:

Debian, Ubuntu, Kubunto: chown -R www-data:www-data /path/to/foswiki

RedHat, SuSE, CentOS and other RPM based distributions

Install apache2, rcs, and perl-CPAN

Perl Module	Package to install	Notes
HTML::Parser	`perl-HTML-Parser`
HTML::Entities		included with HTML::Parser
HTML::Tree	`perl-HTML-Tree`
LWP	`perl-libwww-perl`
version		Must be version 0.77 or newer
Digest::SHA	`perl-Digest-SHA`
Digest::SHA1	`perl-Digest-SHA1`
URI	`perl-URI`
Net::SMTP::SSL	`perl-Net-SMPT-SSL`
Authen::SASL	`perl-Authen-SASL`

After expanding the Foswiki archive, change the ownership of the files:

RedHat, Fedora, CentOS Mandriva: chown -R apache:apache /path/to/foswiki=
Suse: chown -R wwwrun:www /path/to/foswiki

Client Requirements

The standard installation has relatively low browser requirements:

XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant
Cookies, if persistent sessions are required
Javascript, for edit/save/upload functionality
Change {ValidationMethod}{Method} from strikeone to embedded in configure to allow non-javascript browsers to edit/save/upload

CSS and Javascript are used in most skins. Some skins will require more recent releases of browsers. The default skin is tested on IE 6+, Safari, Chrome and Firefox.

You can easily select a balance of browser capability versus look and feel. Try the installed skins at SkinBrowser and more at Foswiki:Extensions.SkinPackage.

Related Topics: AdminDocumentationCategory

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