Installing more.groupware under Mac OS X Server 10.2
29 October 2002
more.groupware is an interesting PHP-based collaborative working environment that allows a group to share calendars, notes, newsgroups and projects among other things that groups may need to do. Since it is based on PHP, the installation is pretty straightforward. The only tricky thing can be setting up MySQL, which is used to store all of the data.
First off you will need to download the moregroupware package and decompress it:
curl -O http://telia.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/moregroupware/moregroupware_0_6_5.tar.gz gnutar -xzvf moregroupware_0_6_5.tar.gz
Then you’ll want to move the code to where you keep your Web sites. I like to keep them in the “Shared Items” folder:
sudo mv -R moregroupware /Shared\ Items/moregroupware
Now cruise on over to Server Settings and create a new site that points to “/Shared Items/moregroupware” and has “index.php” as the default document. If you haven’t already uncommented the two lines in /etc/httpd/httpd.conf to enable PHP for the webserver do that now. For more info on this look at our article on installing Squirrelmail.
So far so good. Now comes the trickier part, setting up MySQL. If you have already done this you can skip ahead to setting up a database specifically for more.groupware. Otherwise you can read up on using MySQL in our System Administration section of our site. Failing all of that for the impatient Apple has made MySQL setup significantly easier on Mac OS X Server 10.2. Go to the Utilities folder and launch MySQL Manager. Click on the lock to authenticate. Click on the Install button. Click on the Start button and then click the box that says “Start MySQL server at system startup."
This starts up MySQL; however, it has a blank password to begin with. This is bad—you should change the MySQL root password (which is not the same thing as changing the root user password). You can use a tool like Webmin or phpMyAdmin, or go back to the command line and set a password for MySQL, swapping in your password.
mysqladmin –u root –p password ‘yourpasswordhere’
Now those of you who already had MySQL running and configured can start paying attention again.
We need to create a database specifically for use by more.groupware and then create a user to administer that database. Again, you can do this by hand (below) or using a tool like Webmin or phpMyAdmin.
mysqladmin -u root -p create moregroupware
You’ll be prompted for a password. This is the MySQL root password that you just created a few moments ago, not your user, or root, password. You’ll need to make a user to administer the database, and ensure it has sufficient permissions to add and delete data, tables, and so forth. For this step, unless you’re a MySQL genius, you will probably find a tool like phpMyAdmin to make the most sense.
We’re almost done. Point your Web browser to the site address that you set up for more.groupware, and go to (site)/setup/index.php. Since on my server I set up a domain for it called “group.afp548.com,” I can use Chimera to go to http://group.afp548.com/setup/index.php. This takes you to a setup page where you can first pick a language then fill out the information for using the MySQL database that we created. The host is “localhost,” the user corresponds to the user you created, and the password is the user’s password that you set. Finally, the database is “moregroupware” (which we created above).
After you set this up you can then go to the main page on the site—in my case it is http://group.afp548.com—and login as the admin user with the password “admin.” From here take a look at the help files to get you through adding other users and configuring the interface.