Installation Guide

Welcome to the YaWPS installation guide! If you are upgrading from an older version of YaWPS, please read the upgrade documentation.

Step 1: Checking Requirements

You'll need:

  • A web browser (Mozilla, IE4.5+, NN4.5+).
  • An FTP client to upload the files.
  • Some webspace that has Perl 5 or higher enabled. You can check the perl version by running perl -v. If you are unsure, please contact your web host.
  • You'll also need your path to perl, it's usually /usr/bin/perl. If you are unsure ask your administrator.

Step 2: Getting Started

Fire up your FTP client and look for a cgi-bin directory on your server.
If you do not see a cgi-bin, or a folder named cgi or something similar, then you will need to make one, as long as you know your host supports cgi.
Create the folder and chmod it to 755.

Note
Windows servers do not accept chmod values. The steps discussing chmod may be skipped if your site is hosted on a Windows server.

Step 3: Setting up the CGI directories

In your server's cgi-bin directory create a directory called 'yawps'.
Upload the entire local YaWPS cgi-bin directory.
You should now have the following directory structure:

cgi-bin/yawps
cgi-bin/yawps/db
cgi-bin/yawps/db/blocks
cgi-bin/yawps/db/calendar
cgi-bin/yawps/db/forum
cgi-bin/yawps/db/forum/messages
cgi-bin/yawps/db/links
cgi-bin/yawps/db/members
cgi-bin/yawps/db/modules
cgi-bin/yawps/db/pages
cgi-bin/yawps/db/polls
cgi-bin/yawps/db/stats
cgi-bin/yawps/db/topics
cgi-bin/yawps/db/topics/articles
cgi-bin/yawps/lang
cgi-bin/yawps/modules
cgi-bin/yawps/modules/Chat
cgi-bin/yawps/modules/Gallery
cgi-bin/yawps/modules/Gallery/lang

Chmod all files ended with .cgi to 755.
Check the perl path at the first line of them to see that it matches the location of the perl executable on the server. (e.g. If the first line is #!/usr/bin/perl -Tw then check that executing the command /usr/bin/perl -v returns the perl version information.
Leave yawpsrc.pl chmod'ed to 644.
Chmod all files and directories inside the db-folder to 777.
Leave .htaccess chmod'ed to 644.
Remove all dummy files inside the db directory.

Step 4: Setting up the non-CGI directory

In the 'public' part of your web space - usually the directory is called 'public', 'public_html', 'www' - create another directory called 'yawps' and in that new directory, upload the local non-cgi folder.
You should now have the following directory structure:

public_html/yawps
public_html/yawps/images
public_html/yawps/images/avatars
public_html/yawps/images/forum
public_html/yawps/images/smilies
public_html/yawps/images/stats
public_html/yawps/images/topics
public_html/yawps/images/uploads
public_html/yawps/themes
public_html/yawps/themes/blue
public_html/yawps/themes/blue/images
public_html/yawps/themes/freshmeat
public_html/yawps/themes/freshmeat/images
public_html/yawps/themes/simple
public_html/yawps/themes/simple/images
public_html/yawps/themes/slash
public_html/yawps/themes/slash/images
public_html/yawps/themes/standard
public_html/yawps/themes/standard/images
public_html/yawps/themes/winstep
public_html/yawps/themes/winstep/images

Make sure that these files are accessible from everywhere!
Chmod yawpsnews.xml to 666.

Step 5: Set Up yawpsrc.pl

Open yawpsrc.pl (in the YaWPS cgi-bin folder) and edit the global variables:

$cfg{pagename}
$cfg{pagetitle}

Enter the absolute path for the following variables:

$cfg{cgi_bin_dir}
$cfg{non_cgi_dir}

You can run the test.cgi script from the tools directory to determine your path to YaWPS (copy test.cgi into the directory where your YaWPS cgi files reside and browse to the URL which corresponds to this location).
Enter the correct URL for the following variables:

$cfg{cgi_bin_url}
$cfg{non_cgi_url}

Enter your email address for $cfg{webmaster_email}.

Step 6: Login to YaWPS

You should then be able to log in as site administrator. Login using admin as username and yawps as password. Remember to change the administrator's password!!

Running YaWPS under mod_perl

Fixme (stephengordon)
Edit the startup.pl file. You will need to change line 13 that says use lib qw(/var/www/perl/yawps); /var/www/perl/yawps needs to be changed to the path of your YaWPS installation. Make sure that the startup.pl is loaded when Apache starts (edit your httpd.conf). Restart the webserver. For detailed information about mod_perl check out the mod_perl documentation site.

Installing YaWPS on Microsoft IIS

Extract the YaWPS tarball into your wwwroot directory.
Open yawpsrc.pl and set $cfg{scriptdir} to the absolute path to your YaWPS directory (i.e. c:/inetpub/wwwroot/YaWPS).
Open all CGI files and modify the shebang line (i.e. #!/usr/bin/perl). It seems that you have to remove the -T switch for faultless operation.
Set the permissions on the db-folder to read/write/execute for IUSR_HOSTNAME (substitute HOSTNAME with the computer's hostname YaWPS is running on).
For general info on how to configure Perl with IIS have a look here: Microsoft Knowledge Base Article.