Pholar

Install Pholar

Pholar is developed and tested on Linux.

Requirements

  • a webserver with php support
  • perl >= 5.28
  • sqlite >= 3.27
  • imagemagick >= 6.9
  • php >= 7.3
  • php-gd
  • php-imagick
  • php-pdo
  • php-pdo-sqlite
  • php-xml
  • php-curl
  • php-mbstring
  • php-zip
  • php-json
  • file utility

Optional

  • php-inotify (for fs:watch console command)
  • ffmpeg >= 4.1 (for video/audio support)
  • libreoffice (for documents support)
  • ghostscript (for pdf/postscript and documents thumbs)

note: versions are from current package versions in Debian Buster (currently 'stable') Pholar is tested on Debian Stable and Archlinux.

Install

Details on how to install a webserver to serve Pholar are not discussed in this guide. The main point is that the webserver must serve Pholar from the root of a domain (or subdomain) starting from the public folder in the repository.

Pholar can be installed cloning the git repository or downloading the repository as a compressed archive. At this time there is still no "stable" release, and development is ongoing in master git branch.

From git

git clone https://gitlab.com/pholar/pholar.git
cd pholar

From tarball

wget https://gitlab.com/pholar/pholar/-/archive/master/pholar-master.tar.gz
tar xzvf pholar-master.tar.gz
mv pholar-master pholar
cd pholar

Install PHP dependencies

bin/getcomposer
bin/composer.phar install --no-dev

Configure

Main configuration for Phar is a file named .env We provide a skeleton file to be used as base:

cp .env.dist .env

The skeleton file has comment describing every options. Optional settings are commented out and presented with default values.

The main setting to change is STORAGEDIR, which must be set to the folder with the media files to indicize.

Remember to set DEBUG to false in production once everything works.

Refer to the Administration Guide for details on available options.

Create database and default users

bin/console migrate

will create the database file with the latest schema

bin/console setupusers

will create the administrator and the guest user. By default the administrator username is admin, but can be changed passing the desidered username as argument to the command.

Refer to the command help with

bin/console setupusers --help

Set permissions

Folders var/ and public/thumb must be writable by the user which run the php scripts. Usually that's the user the webserver run as.

chown -R www-data:www-data var public/thumb

Change user and group as required per your setup.

Install php-inotify via PECL

php-inotify is required by the console command fs:watch, which watch the storage folder for changes and update the database automatically. If your distro doesn't provide php-inotify in its repository, you must install it using PECL.

Here a quick howto to intall php-inotify on Debian:

apt install php-pear php-dev
pecl install inotify
echo "extension=inotify.so" > /etc/php/7.3/mods-available/inotify.ini
phpenmod -s cli inotify

What's next

Refer to the Administration Guide to learn how to configure your Pholar installation, keep the database updated and how to manage users.