The following are general guidelines to getting Giterary running. These instructions are biased towards the Linux side of things, but there is no reason an enterprising individual couldn’t get them running on Mac OS or Windows. They also assume you have a basic working knowledge of the components of the Internet, how to configure your systems to run “services” or “daemons,” or a certain quantity of patience and a willingness to Google something if you don’t understand it.

Requirements

  • A computer capable of running PHP 5.3 or greater and git 1.7.X.X or greater.

    These are widely available from many different Linux distribution packaging mechanisms (Debian and Ubuntu’s apt-get, Centos and Fedora’s yum, etc.) Binary packages are also available from their respective sites for all operating systems.

  • Web server software that supports running PHP

    Numerous pieces of web server software support the use of PHP. Many LAMP setups are pre-configured simply for this ("Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP").

    • Apache (Available on Linux, Mac OS, and Windows)
    • Nginx (Available on Linux, Windows, probably Mac OS)
    • IIS (Windows) (Available on Windows)

    While installing these HTTP servers you should ensure that the steps taken to enable PHP have been taken before proceeding. Those steps are beyond the scope of this document, but are well documented elsewhere. There are also numerous “appliance” virutal machines available on the web, pre-configured to support your flavor of HTTP server. If you are installing to “the cloud,” this may be an easier route than configuring your own HTTP server (though, we would invite you to learn about such things, as they are valuable things to be knowledgeable about).

  • OPTIONAL: An SSH server program (if you are doing git-over-SSH synchronization, which is recommended)

    git has the ability to push and pull from multiple sources, and using multiple network protocols. The most reliable and conventionally accepted appears to be SSH, which provides encryption as well as authentication. If you plan on “synchronizing” another computer with your Giterary instance, you will want to have an SSH server or git-capable equivalent to provide access to your Giterary repository.

    • OpenSSH is widely supported on Linux, Mac OS, and on Windows.
  • OPTIONAL: A git client

    It is highly recommended that you keep a git client handy, just in case you don’t like how Giterary does something, or that you have to do something Giterary doesn’t. These tools let you interact with your Giterary repository in lots of nice ways. I recommend the following:

Latest Version

Grab the latest version of Giterary from:

  • HTTP Download TODO
  • git clone TODO

Set up Web Server

Every web server has a directory into which you can put files, and it will serve those files. Much of the configuration headache for web servers is getting the names, access rules, and pointers to the right directories into place. We leave it up to the reader to maintain their own security, but take heed when we say that the intent of a web server is to put things on the Internet. Be sure that you check to see if things are exposed that should not be (for instance, if you Giterary instance is exposed to whoever happens to be sitting next to your at the airport terminal).

In order to test

< phpinfo(); >

Create Giterary directories

Giterary needs a few directories to run:

  1. The directory of the git repository.
  2. The directory for Giterary to store “cache” information to make the application speedier.
  3. The directory for Giterary to store “session” information that allows you to be logged in to the application.