INSTALL.md

Research Project Calculator Installation

Note: The Research Project Calculator Classic is no longer supported

Mailing List

Please |join the RPC-development mailing list for information about new releases, bugfixes, etc. It is a very low-traffic list.

System Requirements

Server Requirements

• A web server (Apache, IIS, etc) running PHP 5.1.2 or later (Only UNIX/Apache information is supplied in this) guide.''
• A MySQL 5.0+ database
• The ability to run cron jobs or scheduled tasks
• The ability to send mail from PHP using the mail() function

PHP Requirements & Dependencies

• PHP 5.1.2 or later
• PHP PECL::Package::json needed for PHP < 5.3.0 (json_encode() and json_decode() are native to PHP 5.3) http://pecl.php.net/package/json
• PHP MySQLi extension (usually distributed as part of PHP)
• PHP Smarty 3 templating engine http://www.smarty.net/

Installation

Begin by extracting the current Research Project Calculator release archive to your web server.

Database setup

• Create a new MySQL database. We recommend naming it 'rpc'.
• Run the database initialization script (install/rpc-mysql.sql).

From the mysql console:

# Create the database...
mysql> CREATE DATABASE rpc;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.04 sec)

# Make it active...
mysql> USE rpc;
Database changed

# Run the initialization script...
mysql> source install/rpc-mysql.sql
Query OK, 0 rows affected, 1 warning (0.00 sec)
Query OK, 0 rows affected, 1 warning (0.00 sec)
...
...
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

# Verify the tables were created...
mysql> SHOW TABLES;
+----------------------+
| Tables_in_rpc        |
+----------------------+
| assignments          |
| assignments_brief_vw |
| linked_assignments   |
| linked_steps         |
| linked_steps_vw      |
| native_sessions      |
| steps                |
| steps_vw             |
| templates_vw         |
| users                |
+----------------------+
10 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Application setup on the web server

• RPC ships with a default .htaccess file for Apache. Edit .htaccess if you need to, particularly if you need to change RewriteBase to a path other than the root.
• Make sure PHP Smarty and PECL::json (if necessary) are installed and working in PHP.
• Copy the rpc/ directory to its web-accessible location on your web server.
• Set the correct permissions on rpc/tmpl/compile/. It must be writable by the web server user. On a Unix/Linux/Apache server, this is typically:

# Assuming user "apache", might be "httpd" or "apache2"
chown apache rpc/tmpl/compile
chmod 700 rpc/tmpl/compile

• Setup a cron job to run nightly emailing scripts

crontab -e
# Run scripts/rpc_reminders.php each night at 12:01
1 0 * * * /path/to/installation/rpc/scripts/rpc_reminders.php

Application Configuration

Research Project Calculator configuration is stored in inc/config.inc.php.

• Rename inc/example_config.inc.php to 'inc/config.inc.php`
• Edit config.inc.php. The DB_* directives are most important, almost all will require some attention and changes. Documentation on each directive is available in the example config file.
• Make sure you've identified a username/email address in AUTH_SUPERUSER!

Get Started

• Login as the address specified in AUTH_SUPERUSER
• No assignment templates have been created in your installation. You can create them manually, or if you would like to copy the ones used by Minitex, contact Minitex with a message sent to the attention of Link Swanson.

User Types & Administration

• User type descriptions and administration

Advanced Topics

• Skins & Theming
• Custom authentication plugins
• URL Rewriting (not yet documented)