18 April 2010, 9:23

Hello,

I am a little confused regarding the documentation and I was wondering if someone could provide a more detailed explanation.

I am trying to install Mahara on a Ubuntu 9.10 system.  I have install the LAMP piece of this and and run apt-get install Mahara.  I have created the database.   What I am confused by is this in the docuemtation.

"Once you have the code, copy the contents of the htdocs/ directory to your webserver. It is best if you either:

• Copy the entire directory, then rename it to something like 'mahara' - so you will see your site at example.org/mahara/; or

• Copy the contents of the htdocs/ directory to the top level public directory (often called htdocs or public_html) of your webserver, so you can see your site at example.org"

Could somebody provide me with an example of the command line that would accomplish what they are saying?  I guess I am confused as to the speciic location of the htdocs they are talking about and where it's specifically supposed to go. 

cp "from location" to "the new location"

Thanks...

18 April 2010, 18:17

If I'm correct Ubuntu should use the same locations as Debian, which is what I use. So here's what I get from these instructions.

The webserver (apache2 in this case) will by default look in /var/www for any web sites that it can serve. If you unpack the Mahara download you will see a directory called "htdocs". All the files and directories under this directory are what comprise the web site called Mahara.

If you copy this "htdocs" directory to /var/www/ and rename it mahara you can then access it from a web browser as "http://yourdomain.com/mahara".

If you copy the contents of the "htdocs" directory to /var/www (first moving any existing files that happen to be there to a safe backup location) then you will be able to access Mahara in a web browser as "http://yourdomain.com"

Enjoy.

18 April 2010, 19:09

Gary is correct, for manual installs.  But if you install mahara from the ubuntu package using "apt-get install mahara" then you don't need to download and copy the code yourself -- the package will install it for you somewhere under /usr/share (I think -- it's a long time since I've tried installing the Mahara package).

18 April 2010, 20:27

Hi Curtis,

The installation through the Debian/Ubuntu packaging system is a bit simpler so it doesn't quite follow the long instructions we have in the documentation. The documentation for the package is installed in /usr/share/doc/mahara/README.Debian (a copy can be found here: http://git.debian.org/?p=collab-maint/mahara.git;a=blob;f=debian/README.Debian).

Once you have created the database and installed the package (it will ask you for the database details) then you need to finish the Apache setup. To get started quickly just uncomment the Alias line in /etc/apache2/conf.d/mahara and restart apache:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 stop

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 start

Then you should be able to browse to http://localhost/mahara and complete the usual web-based setup.

Francois