Installation

You don't have to be a web developer or programmer to install Tiki. Tiki has an installer which will do most of the work for you, and the rest can be done from your control panel.

Free Installations: If you are a complete novice (or are just not into DIY) many Tiki friendly hosts will setup tiki for you free of charge.

1. Basic overview in Tiki 3: Install and Profiles

This new installer and the application of the new set of Profiles is new in Tiki3, and you can have a quick look at it in the following 12 min. screencast:

You can also watch an installation movie for Tiki 4.x (hosted by TikiWiki for Dummies Smarties).

2. Step by step installation

Before You Begin

Before installing, please read the Requirements and Setup information. Proper planning can ensure a worry-free installation. If you are looking for a new webhost, we have a list of Tiki Friendly Hosts. The instructions below are generic and apply to most shared hosts. See Installation Guides for instructions for specific combinations of operating system and web servers.

Pre-requisites

This guide assumes you have

• FTP or SSH (shell) access to a webserver (such as Apache) with PHP5
  • Typically, you upload the files via a FTP client such as WinSCP or FileZilla.
• access to a MySQL database (should be provided by your webhost)

Step 1. Create the database

Tiki requires MySQL.

Many hosts offer a point & click interface to create databases and database users. For example, if your web host has cPanel you probably can see phpMyAdmin in the main menu or a the section labeled Databases.

Creating a database (and a database user) is a very simple operation. Essentially you will create a blank (empty) database that the Tiki installer will later populate with the correct tables and data.

The Three steps of Database Setup.

1. Create a database.
   • You can name the database anything you want, but don't get fancy with the name — you can use tiki. Depending on your web host, your full database in phpMyAdmin may be listed as accountname_tiki.
     Note: By default, Tiki uses UTF-8 for your database encoding. We strongly encourage you to select "utf8" in the "collation" drop-down box in phpmyadmin (or similar), in the field shown in the following image:
     
     If you select a different encoding method, you may need to manually update your ../db/local.php file.
     Tip: If you plan on having multiple Tiki installations, don't use tiki as the database name.
   • Be sure to record the database name, you will need it later.
2. Create a database user (with password)
   • Again, don't get fancy with the database username. In fact, you can use the same name that you selected for the database (in step 1).
   • Select a strong password. You can easily recover your database username and password if necessary (by reviewing the ../db/local.php file in your Tiki directory.
   • Be sure to record the username and password. You will need it later.
3. Assign all database permissions to the database user that you created (in step 2).

Congratulations. You now have a database that is ready to use, as well a a database user (and password) with the necessary permissions.

Step 2: Download and unzip

Download the current version of Tiki to your local computer from SourceForge.net.

The full download is ~20MB.

Once you have downloaded, you should decompress (unzip) the Tiki archive file to your local hard drive.

Step 3: Upload

Next, you need to connect via FTP (or SCP, SFTP, Rsync, SSH, etc) to your web host.

Once connected, find your web directory. It is often called www or public_html (this is different from host to host).

Then, copy all the Tiki files.

If Tiki will be sharing the space with other applications, it can be a good idea to put in a subdirectory (ex.: http://www.yourdomain.com/tiki/). Otherwise, you can put directly in the web directory, and thus, Tiki will be accessible when you visit http://www.yourdomain.com

Time for more coffee?

Step 4: Go to your website.

Open your browser and go to your new website address (such as http://www.yourdomain.com/tiki/. You should see a message indicating that Tiki could not connect to the database and prompting you to run the Tiki installer (tiki-install.php).

Troubleshooting

If your browser returns an error like "Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING", you may have a PHP4/PHP5 mix up. Look for "PHP5" in your /.htaccess file and follow the instructions there.

If your server is unhappy with Tiki file and folder permissions (this is dependent on server configuration), you may get an error message or blank pages. These failed attempts are typically in the error log.

Too few permissions If a message appears indicating that specific directories are not writable, you will need to change the permissions on the indicated directories. Tiki will attempt to verify that it can read (and write) to all necessary directories. This error message will include instructions about how to resolve the issue.

Too many permissions If you are getting Internal Server Error 500, blank pages or similar, it could be that the permissions on the files are not appropriate for your webhost.

If you have shell access, you can run:

sh setup.sh

and answer any questions. If you don't know what to answer, just click "enter" to keep the defaults.

If "sh setup.sh" doesn't work for you, you may try, in your ./tiki/ directory

chmod -R 777 ./db ./dump ./img/wiki ./img/wiki_up ./img/trackers ./modules/cache ./temp ./temp/cache ./templates_c ./templates ./styles ./whelp/

Another way is to set permissions for all directories and then set permissions for all files. For example, to set the permissions for all directories to 777 and the permissions for all files to 644, use the following separate commands through shell access:

find [YOURDIR] -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
 
find [YOURDIR] -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

After correcting any directory or file permission problems, visit tiki-install.php to continue.

Step 5: Run the Tiki installer (tiki-install.php)

Alternative "Step 5" without tiki-install.php

Please see: Manual Installation

Step 6: Log in for the first time

Log in using the login box in the right-hand column.

1. Enter those informations :
   1. user: Enter admin
   2. pass: Enter admin
2. Click login.

Step 7: Change the default password.

Use a strong password. You may want to logout right away, and login again, letting your password manager record your password.

Step 8: Congratulations !

It is recommended to create a new user and give him admin privileges instead of regularly using the admin account. You can now explore the interface but you should check the extra steps before to get you started.

Step 9: Configure Your Tiki

Please visit Initial Configuration to explain the recommended next steps, or configuration for the table of contents replated to configuring Tiki.

Add new features through post-install Profiles

Starting in Tiki3, you can enable several settings/permissions/content in sets altogether in a single go, in order to provide a common feature to your tiki site (make it multilingual, add freetags, configure it as a Collaborative environment, ...). And all that with a just few clicks through the Profile Manager from "Admin > Profiles".

Read more about it at Profiles.

3. For more information on the Tiki installation process...

Related pages:

Installation FAQ Installation Guides - recipes, tips and detailed knowledge about specific hosting environments Migrate to Tikiwiki Move Tiki to a new server Reinstall - to point tiki to a new Database or re-run an upgrade

Tiki in Ten minutes - a recipe for command line installations. Fantastico Installation Using SSH (for newbies) Manual Installation MultiTiki

• Install
• How to install
• How to install Tiki
• How to install TikiWiki

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