TWiki 4.1 Dreamhost

Doing this was considerably easier than I thought it would be!

You will need ssh access or using the http://webftp.dreamhost.com would also be fine.

Download TWiki from here.

Create the directory in which you would like to keep TWiki in my case it shall be blog/ because I will be also trying to convert this wiki into a blogging application for testing and documentation purposes that I will be trying to do.

Dreamhost in it’s webftp.dreamhost.com has a good feature where you can upload zip’ed or any archived file and it will extract it for you failing that you can always use your ftp account but will have to be unzipped at before had and uploaded as a extracted folder, this can take some time. If you have shell access you should already know how to extract a tgz or zip file.

Once that is done you can follow the rest of these instructions:

In your ‘bin’ directory copy the LocalLib.cfg.txt to LocalLib.cfg and edit the following lines to match your configuration.


# -------------- Path to lib directory containing TWiki.pm.
#
# REQUIRED
# The absolute path to the 'lib' directory in your installation..

$twikiLibPath = "/blog/lib";

From my understanding the way that dreamhost works is that a user account is given a domain or sub-domain to control so in my case when I log in to my dreamhost account (ftp/ssh or otherwise), I go to ‘/home/username/’ and under that I find my wiki.somedomain.com. This is also where all the apache data files to be served to the world are stored and consequently this is the top level that most of you scripts will see. So in most cases when asked for absolute paths you can start from here as can been seen in the above config for LocalLib.cfg line change.

While staying in your bin copy the configure file to configure.pl, this will allow the dreamhost apache servers to read the file so that TWiki can be setup.

If you are using the command line:
cp configure configure.pl

When you are going though the paths for your configuration in configure.pl you will notice that you absolute path

The simplest way to refer to your directory, /home/yourname, is actually a symbolic link to something like /home/.(somename)/yourname. You should use the /home/yourname format, which is somewhat neater looking and avoids problems if Dreamhost move your home directory.

Once you have sorted our any errors and fixed the paths so that they are correct we have to go back to copying some more editing and copying more files.

Go to the top level of your domain so in this case if the wiki was located at wiki.somedomain.com/blog in my webftp, ssh, or ftp client I would go to the wiki.somedomain.com folder and create the file .htaccess in that file I would put in the following lines

# The first path here must be a URL path, not a file pathname
Redirect /blog/index.html http://wiki.somedomain/blog/bin/view


This will allow anyone who goes to wiki.somedomain.com/blog to go straight to http://wiki.somedomain/blog/bin/view where the TWiki files will be served.

But you will notice that the fines are not working and you are seeing them as text this is where the next step comes in, go back to the bin directory (in dreamhost /home/username/wiki.somedomain/com/blog/bin). There you will notice a file called .htaccess.txt all you have to do here is copy that file from .htaccess.txt to .htaccess.

That should be pretty much it, when you now go to wiki.somedomain.com/blog you should be able to see your newly installed TWiki Wiki.

Much Much easier than it used to be, from here most of the rest of the documentation for plugins and skins from the website should suffice

References from here: http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/DreamhostSetupNotes & http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/TWiki/TWikiInstallationGuide