Installing Joomla! on Sourceforge Project

[thednx]

howdy,

i guess a not-so-standard question: i am setting up joomla on Sourceforge.net (helping out on an open source project), but nomatter what i do, i get an unwritable configuration.php and basically my whole system permissions are absolutely no-no writable.
the site works, but hey, a non-configurable content management system is safe but unflexible...

since i`m not THE unix/linux freak, i tried out the chmod g+w / chmod 777 options on files and directories, but to no avail.
i use winscp to upload the files; cant set anything there (it wont have any effect.)
i use putty to shell onto the server, and try to chmod there, but nothing.

when starting the shell, i get this message: (excerpt):

As per the previous announcement in the sitewide newsletter sent on
2005-02-28, the project home directories on the project web servers
have been remounted as read-only on 2005-08-15 at 9:00 AM. We highly
recommend moving to a database storage mechanism (the MySQL server we
provide) or the new directory tree provided for all data writing needs
from the project web servers. This operation is described at:
https://sourceforge.net/docs/E07#permissions/.

there it says that i need to move everything that needs writing to the tmp directory. is that possible with joomla? what would i need in htdocs, what would i move to tmp?

[d2o]

I'd like to reask this question. I have the same problems with installing Joomla on SourceForge. Does anyone have a clue, how to make Joomla work on sf.net? I found an old thread over at *ambo-Forums, but the project referred to does no longer exist (or at least the link has been removed): http://forum.mamboserver.com/showthread ... ourceforge

I ignored configuration.php not being writable and copied the result to configuration.php. I do get the login-form, but when logging in, it only returns to the form with no notice. Maybe, because the directories mentioned in the installation really have to be writable, but this is not possible at sf.net.

Anyone? Workarounds?

Thanks,
Stefan

[d2o]

Ok, answering myself, just in case someone is interested

Processing the installation-procedure of Joomla without write permissions is perfectly fine. You just have to copy the resulting configuration data to configuration.php in the CMS folder (copy & cat > configuration.php, or create a local configuration.php and sftp it over). The main problem is, that the session management needs write permission, i.e., when you try to log in, it would resend you to the login form every time.
To give the session management write permission, you need to change its location. First, you create a temporary project folder and set some access rights (PROECTNAME stands for the projects unix name on sourceforge):

mkdir /tmp/persistent/PROJECTNAME
chmod o+w-r /tmp/persistent/PROJECTNAME

You should make sure, that the project group has write access, too. This is not necessary for Joomla to run, but for project members to access or change it later on:
chmod g+w /tmp/persistent/PROJECTNAME

Now, you have to prepare for Joomla, which is done by creating or extending the .htaccess file with the following lines:

php_value register_globals 0
php_value session.save_path /tmp/persistent/PROJECTNAME

The first is to switch off register globals, which I think is necessary for Joomla to run safe. The second sets the path used by php to store session data. As the target folder is non readable by others, it should be quite safe with respect to cross-intrusion.

If you want to use the caching mechanism of Joomla, you should create a subfolder cache in that location and change its path in configuration.php.

This should make Joomla run with the limitation that you cannot install any components or modules and cannot upload media via the administrator interface. You have to use sftp for that.

Cheers,
Stefan