Installing Elgg

Before you begin, make sure you have read Elgg's technical requirements. If you discover problems after following these instructions, check out the troubleshooting page.

1. Upload Elgg

Download the latest version of Elgg. Unzip Elgg and upload it to your webserver.

• If you want Elgg in your root domain (e.g. http://example.com), move or upload the contents of the unzipped Elgg folder into the document root directory of your server.
• If you want Elgg in its own subdirectory on your website (e.g. http://example.com/elgg), rename your unzipped directory to the name you would like the subdirectory to have and upload the directory to your document root.

2. Create a data folder

Elgg needs a special folder to store uploaded files, including profile icons and photos. You will need to create this for it.

We recommend that this folder is called data. For security reasons this should be stored outside of your document root. For example, if Elgg is installed in /home/elgg/html/, you might create it in /home/elgg/data. Alternately, if Elgg is installed /home/username/public_html/, then you may want to create it in/home/username/elgg/.

Once this folder has been created, you'll need to make sure Elgg has permission to write to it. This shouldn't be a problem on Windows-based servers, but if your server runs Linux or a UNIX variant, you'll need to type something like:

chmod 777 /home/elgg/data/

If you use a graphical client to upload files, you can usually set this by right or shift-clicking on the folder and selecting 'properties' or 'Get Info'.

3. Create a database

Using your database administration tool of choice (if you're unsure about this, ask your system administrator), create a new database for Elgg. Add a user to the database with all privileges. Make sure you know the database name, username and password necessary to access this as you will be prompted to add this information in the installer.

• Create a database with cPanel

4. Visit your Elgg site

Once you've performed these steps, visit your Elgg site in your web browser. Elgg will take you through the rest of the installation process from there.

Note for Elgg 1.6: At the end, you need to create the administrator's account. To do this, go to the section "Register" (on the Elgg index page). The first registered user will become the administrator of the Elgg site.

A note on settings and .htaccess

The Elgg installer will try and create two files for you:

• engine/settings.php, which contains the database settings for your installation
• .htaccess, which allows Elgg to generate dynamic URLs

If these files can't be automatically generated, for example because you don't have the correct directory permissions, Elgg will tell you how to create them. You could also change the permissions on the root directory and the engine directory to 777, complete the install process, and them change the permissions back to their original settings. If, for some reason, this won't work, you will need to:

• Copy engine/settings.example.php to engine/settings.php, open it up in a text editor and fill in your database details
• Copy /htaccess_dist to /.htaccess

Windows Installation

• Assuming no MySQL, PHP or Apache installations exist already.
• Best run as a development/test server
• Two primary options (XAMPP or EasyPHP - these instructions are for Easy PHP)

1 - Stop IIS running if installed

2 - Download and install the latest Easy PHP from http://www.easyphp.org (16MB download)

3 - Set up the database and point the web server to your Elgg folder (all done from the EasyPHP tray icon)

4 - From the tray icon go Configuration/Apache find the line "#LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so" and remove the "#"

5 - From the tray icon fo Configuration/PHP find the line ";extension=php_curl.dll" and remove the ";"

6 - A reboot is best Elgg should run via http://127.0.0.1