Elgg is a social networking framework. It provides the necessary functionality to allow you to run your own social networking site, whether publicly (like Facebook) or internally on a networked intranet (like Microsoft Sharepoint).

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. For detailed, step-by-step instructions for different types of local server environments (could be your home computer), see the operating specific instructions at the bottom of the page.

1. Upload Elgg

• Download the latest version of Elgg to your computer and then unzip it.
• On the webserver, you can store elgg in one of two ways:
  • In its own directory (i.e. /home/www/elgg)
  • In the document root (i.e. /home/www)
• Upload the files with an FTP client to your web server.

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 directory.
We recommend that this folder be called "data". For security reasons, this folder must be stored outside of your document root. For example, if Elgg is installed in:

 /home/www/elgg/

You might want to create the data folder in:

 /home/www/data

Alternately, if Elgg is installed in:

 /home/username/public_html/

then you may want to create it in:

 /home/username/data/

Once this folder has been created, you'll need to make sure the web server Elgg is running on has permission to write to and create directories in it. This shouldn't be a problem on Windows-based servers, but if your server runs Linux, Mac OS X or a UNIX variant, you'll need to set the permissions on the directory.
If you are using a graphical FTP client to upload files, you can usually set permissions by right clicking on the folder and selecting 'properties' or 'Get Info'.
NOTE: Setting your data directory to 777 will work, but it is insecure and is not recommended. If you are unsure how to correctly set permissions, read this documentation or contact your host for more information.

3. Create a MySQL database

Using your database administration tool of choice (if you're unsure about this, ask your system administrator), create a new MySQL database for Elgg. You can create a MySQL database with any of the following tools:

• cPanel
• phpMyAdmin
• MySQL commandline client

Make sure you add a user to the database with all privileges and record the database name, username and password. You will need this information when installing Elgg.

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. The first account that you create at the end of the installation process will be an administrator account.

A note on settings.php 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 the web server doesn't have write permissions in the directories, Elgg will tell you how to create them. You could also temporarily change the permissions on the root directory and the engine directory. Set the permissions on those two directories so that the web server can write those two files, 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

Note for installation on a virtual host (e.g. Rackspace, Amazon EC2)
For installation to proceed successfully, modify the .htaccess file in the root, and uncomment:

117: #RewriteBase /

To be:

117: RewriteBase /

XAMPP Installation for Windows

• If you want to test your Elgg installation on your local computer running Windows

• Best run as a development/test server

1 - Download and install XAMPP to your computer from http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html - we'll assume you installed it on the C drive
2 - Once the installation is completed, it will prompt you to start the XAMPP controller panel. Leave it for now.
3 - Open C:\xampp\apache\conf\httpd.conf file with notepad and find the line "#LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so" and remove the "#" and save it.
4 - Edit the php.ini file and change arg_separator.output = & to arg_separator.output = &
5 - Now go to C:\xampp and double click on the xampp_start application
6 - Then go to http://localhost/
7 - Change your server's password in the security option
8 - Go to http://localhost/phpmyadmin and login with the username and the password of your server
9 - Create a database called "elgg" in your phpmyadmin panel
10 - Now download Elgg. Unzip it and extract to C:\Xampp\htdocs\sites\elgg
11 - Create the Elgg data folder as C:\Xampp\htdocs\sites\data
12 - Go to http://localhost/sites/elgg
13 - You will be taken to the Elgg installation steps. Install it and enjoy.