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 GUI client
You will need the command line git client installed. However, there are a number of GUI clients (graphical user interfaces) that are a lot more friendly to human eyes.
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. They also provide a more forgiving git learning tool than the command line, man pages, and frustrated Google searches. I recommend the following:
- TortoiseGit (for Windows)
- SourceTree (for MacOS)
Latest Version
Grab the latest version of Giterary from:
- HTTP Download TODO
- git clone TODO
Verify PHP versus Your Web Server
Every web server has a directory into which you can put files, and it will serve those files, for better or for worse.
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).
Most important to establishing this “hosted directory” is ensuring that PHP is configured correctly. Within your “hosted” directory, place a file called test.php, which has only these contents.
<? phpinfo(); ?>
Afterwards, using your web browser, browse to a URL referencing your host and the test.php file, for instance:
http://localhost/test.php (ifIf you plan to be accessing Giterary from only your own machine) http://myserver/test.php (ifmachine: http://localhost/test.php If you are installing to a separate server) http://myserver/giterary/test.php (ifserver: http://myserver/test.php If you are installing Giterary to a place other than the "document root,” in Apache terms.)URL's “root” (referring to the “/giterary/” portion of the URL not being at the “root” of the path after the myserver host specification.) http://myserver/giterary/test.php
This page should contain an output from the phpinfo function that lists all of the compilation, configuration, and dependency information for your PHP installation. It will be purple.
If this is running successfully, then you have a working PHP configuration for your web server. Good job!
Verify Git Is Working
From your operating system’s command line (any terminal in Linux, Terminal in MacOS, cmd in Windows), attempt to execute the following command.
git --version
It should print out something like this:
git version 1.7.4.1
Alternatively, if your environment paths are somehow incorrect, you may need to be explicit in the path to your git executable.
To find your explicit path on Linux and MacOSX, you can issue the following command:
which git
…which should return the explicit path. In my case, it returns this:
/usr/local/git/bin/git
With your explicit path, run the following command (but with your explicit path):
/usr/local/git/bin/git --version
This should give you version information for your installation of git.
Verify the security configuration on your system for your git client. It needs to be executable by the user that is running your web server. This is critical for Giterary to function.
Note this path value, as this is the path you will need to use later in the Giterary configuration.
Create Giterary directories
Giterary needs a few directories to run:
- The directory of the git repository.
- The directory for Giterary to store “cache” information to make the application speedier.
- The directory for Giterary to store “session” information that allows you to be logged in to the application.