Integrations

Installation overview

ResourceSpace is a standard PHP/MySQL application and the process should be familiar if you've installed other PHP/MySQL applications before.

Most issues encountered relate to the default php.ini settings. As you may be handling large resource files the default values for memory, upload size and time-out limit often need to be increased.

  • Choose the location of your ResourceSpace web root directory. If you are not running other sites you can install ResourceSpace into the default web root. If you want ResourceSpace to share the same domain name as another site then you can use a subdirectory of your web root
  • Using SVN or GIT, check out the latest version into your chosen folder.

The application is capable of running both in the web root folder or several levels deep within an existing folder structure. Using SVN checkout is preferable to using the zip file whether you are a developer or not, since it permits simple upgrades of the software.

  • Configure the database
  • Configure PHP (see Configuring Your PHP.ini).
  • The 'filestore' and 'include' folders must be writable by the web server (either 'chmod 777 filestore' then 'chmod -R 777 include' or chown/chgrp the folders to your web server's user/group).
  • The system should now be up and running at the configured URL and the setup process will commence. You will be asked for database connection details and you will need to provide an administrator username and password.
  • Try 'Admin -> System -> Installation Check' to make sure everything is configured correctly.

Important: When the system is in full use (i.e. when you go live) the file 'cron_copy_hitcount.php' should be set to execute once each night to ensure relevance matching is accurate. You can do this using a cron job which runs 'wget' and fetches the file's URL. The script then copies the resource usage information collected during the day from the temporary columns into the live columns. This is not run in real time as the resource/keyword usage counts are used when ordering resources when searching (this is how the relevance matching works), so were the counters updated instantly, the resources would move around within your result set as you accessed them, as your own activity would be immediately affecting the search order.

Much of the system configuration such as metadata fields, user groups, and resource types can be managed within the Admin -> Setup.

The GD library (which is a minimum requirement) will provide automatic thumbnail previews for JPEG, GIF and PNG files. This can be enabled for many more image and video file formats by installing ImageMagick and FFmpeg, setting the paths to the binaries in config.php.

If using Apache it is important to make sure that the Indexes option is not set. If this is set the 'filestore' folder will be publicly available as the scrambled resource paths will be clearly visible.