I posted on 5 April about needing to set up a LAMP server to test drive Joomala (Website Content Manager). After hitting the books for a few days, I was able to do that successfully. It is up and running. Needless to say, I do not understand the things that were done behind the scenes, so I have a few simple newcomer questions:
I changed the permissions on the srv/www/… folders to allow full access for members of the “users” group so I could copy the Joomla installation files to …/htdocs. After deleting the old index.html file, the Joomla installation came up, so it worked. However, I suspect that what I did is not good practice. What should I have done instead? Apache 2 is running as localhost and I am the only user.
The second step of the Joomla installation is a “pre-installation check”. It says that I need: a) Zlib Compression support and b) configuration.php writable.
It’s ok to change the ownership of /srv/www/htdocs/joomla (or wherever you have it) to allow users to edit the files within. However any upload directories should be writable to wwwrun, the account of the webserver. And as you saw, to write the configuration the first time, configuration.php should be writable by wwwrun. After the config is done, you should change it back to some other account to prevent reconfiguration via the web page.
For zlib you need the php5-zlib package. This can be installed via YaST or zypper, i.e.
True, that probably isn’t a great practice. Typically you want to
prevent the ‘wwwrun’ user from owning files and you want to prevent the
Apache service from modify files (‘wwwrun’ user or ‘www’ group). So how
do you do this? I typically set all of the files I modify to be
user-owned by my user and then I make them group-owned by 'www, with
permissions of 640 for files and 750 for directories. This lets the web
server view the files enough to send them to users after processing but
keeps anybody from modifying them. You can also get into extended
attributes but I don’t want to talk about that right now.
Add PHP’s zlib package, which is probably something simple like the
following:
sudo /sbin/yast -i php5-zlib
For the second set configuration.php to be (temporarily) writable by the
Apache user… set its permissions to 666 if nothing else and then when
the configuration is saved re-set this back to 440 or whatever it should
be for security.
Good luck.
TwoHoot wrote:
> I posted on 5 April about needing to set up a LAMP server to test drive
> Joomala (Website Content Manager). After hitting the books for a few
> days, I was able to do that successfully. It is up and running. Needless
> to say, I do not understand the things that were done behind the scenes,
> so I have a few simple newcomer questions:
>
> 1) I changed the permissions on the srv/www/… folders to allow full
> access for members of the “users” group so I could copy the Joomla
> installation files to …/htdocs. After deleting the old index.html
> file, the Joomla installation came up, so it worked. However, I suspect
> that what I did is not good practice. What should I have done instead?
> Apache 2 is running as localhost and I am the only user.
>
> 2) The second step of the Joomla installation is a “pre-installation
> check”. It says that I need: a) Zlib Compression support and b)
> configuration.php writable.
>
> How do I do those two things?
>
> Cordially,
> TwoHoot
>
>
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Thank you. I installed the PHP5lib using YaST with no problem.
However, I don’t know where to start with the configuration.PHP. Where and how do I find it for starters?
I know it is a dumb question. Maybe if you point me in the right direction on this problem, I will be able to apply the lessons learned to future problems and not have to bother the forum.
What usually happens is that the web app creates it when you go into the configuration screen, so it won’t exist at the beginning. Just go the configuration screen and it will probably say “I can’t write to this file”. Temporarily give write access to wwwrun to the directory, and revert it after the configuration file has been created, and also change the owner of the configuration file. I’m sure the Joomla install docs cover all this.
If you installed php5-zlib then you just need to restart Apache and the
changes should be applied for that error to go away. Changing the
permissions on the file can be done without restart anything though I’m
not sure if you’re asking about that…
Good luck.
TwoHoot wrote:
> Thank you. I installed the PHP5lib using YaST with no problem.
>
> However, I don’t know where to start with the configuration.PHP. Where
> and how do I find it for starters?
>
> I know it is a dumb question. Maybe if you point me in the right
> direction on this problem, I will be able to apply the lessons learned
> to future problems and not have to bother the forum.
>
> Again, thank you for your help.
>
> Cordially,
> TwoHoot
>
>
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