Community  »  Applications  »  Chora

Installing Chora H5

Contact: chora@lists.horde.org

This document contains instructions for installing the Chora Repository Viewer on your system.

For information on the capabilities and features of Chora, see the file README in the top-level directory of the Chora distribution.

1   Prerequisites

To function properly, Chora requires the following:

  1. A working Horde installation.

    Chora runs within the Horde Application Framework, a set of common tools for web applications written in PHP. You must install Horde before installing Chora.

    Important

    Chora H5 requires version 5.0+ of the Horde Framework - earlier versions of Horde will not work.

    Important

    Be sure to have completed all of the steps in the horde/docs/INSTALL file for the Horde Framework before installing Chora. Many of Chora's prerequisites are also Horde prerequisites. Additionally, many of Chora's optional features are configured via the Horde install.

  2. A VCS repository to view.

    Chora can display any number of local and remote repositories. If accessing a local repository, the user under which the web server is running needs read access to the repositories.

    TODO: Documentation on the various drivers

  3. VCS binaries.

    Depending on which kind of repositories you want to use, you need SVN (http://subversion.tigris.org/), RCS/CVS (http://www.cvshome.org/), or Git (http://git-scm.com/) binaries.

2   Installing Chora

There are several ways to install Chora. The recommended way to install Chora is using the PEAR installer. Alternatively it can be installed from tarballs. Finally, if you want to run the latest development code, or get the latest, not yet released, fixes, you can install Chora from Git.

2.1   Installing with PEAR

First follow the instructions in horde/docs/INSTALL to prepare a PEAR environment for Horde and install the Horde Framework.

When installing Chora through PEAR now, the installer will automatically install any dependencies of Chora too. If you want to install Chora with all optional dependencies, but without the binary PECL packages that need to be compiled, specify both the -a and the -B flag:

pear install -a -B horde/chora

By default, only the required dependencies will be installed:

pear install horde/chora

If you want to install Chora even with all binary dependencies, you need to remove the -B flag. Please note that this might also try to install PHP extensions through PECL that might need further configuration or activation in your PHP configuration:

pear install -a horde/chora

2.2   Installing from Release Tarballs

Important

As of today, there are no tarballs released for Chora 3 yet. Please use the Installing with PEAR method to install Chora 3.

Chora can be obtained from the Horde website and FTP server, at

http://www.horde.org/apps/chora

ftp://ftp.horde.org/pub/chora/

Or use the mirror closest to you:

http://www.horde.org/mirrors.php

Chora is written in PHP, and must be installed in a web-accessible directory. The precise location of this directory will differ from system to system. Conventionally, Chora is installed directly underneath Horde in the webserver's document tree.

Since Chora is written in PHP, there is no compilation necessary; simply expand the distribution where you want it to reside and rename the root directory of the distribution to whatever you wish to appear in the URL. For example, with the Apache webserver's default document root of /usr/local/apache/htdocs, you would type:

cd /usr/local/apache/htdocs/horde
tar zxvf /path/to/chora-x.y.z.tar.gz
mv chora-x.y.z chora

and would then find Chora at the URL:

http://your-server/horde/chora/

3   Configuring Chora

  1. Configuring Chora

    You must login to Horde as a Horde Administrator to finish the configuration of Chora. Use the Horde Administration menu item to get to the administration page, and then click on the Configuration icon to get the configuration page. Select Version Control from the selection list of applications. Fill in or change any configuration values as needed. When done click on Generate Version Control Configuration to generate the conf.php file. If your web server doesn't have write permissions to the Chora configuration directory or file, it will not be able to write the file. In this case, go back to Configuration and choose one of the other methods to create the configuration file chora/config/conf.php.

    To configure Chora, change to the config/ directory of the installed distribution, and copy the backends.php.dist configuration file to backends.php and edit it to your needs. You must be sure to list your repository names and configuration information in backends.php.

    Documentation on the format and purpose of the other configuration files in the config/ directory can be found in each file. You may create *.local.php versions of these files if you wish to customize Chora's appearance and behavior. See the header of the configuration files for details and examples. The defaults will be correct for most sites.

  2. Testing Chora

    Go to the Chora URL, and test out all the functionality to ensure it is working.

    If you run into a problem with annotationsin CVS repositories, it is because some versions of CVS insist on having the CVSROOT/history file as world-writable. Either make this file world-writable, or simply delete it (you don't need to have it for CVS to work).

4   Obtaining Support

If you encounter problems with Chora, help is available!

The Horde Frequently Asked Questions List (FAQ), available on the Web at

http://wiki.horde.org/FAQ

The Horde Project runs a number of mailing lists, for individual applications and for issues relating to the project as a whole. Information, archives, and subscription information can be found at

http://www.horde.org/community/mail

Lastly, Horde developers, contributors and users may also be found on IRC, on the channel #horde on the Freenode Network (irc.freenode.net).

Please keep in mind that Chora is free software written by volunteers. For information on reasonable support expectations, please read

http://www.horde.org/community/support

Thanks for using Chora!

The Horde team