Essential Installation Tips

Although you have (hopefully) already installed and configured your Tiki, in this section I'll illustrate some of my "essential" installation tips that you may one day need!

Tip: Learn about installation basics in Getting Started in Tiki for Dummies Smarties.

Performing a Manual Installation

In most instances, the Tiki Installer will successfully install and configure Tiki. There are, however, some instances in which you may need to perform a manual installation

To install Tiki manually:

1. Upload (or unzip) the Tiki files to your host.
2. Create a new MySQL database for Tiki.
3. Create a database user with full administrator permissions to the database.
4. Assign the database user to the newly created database.
5. Execute the ../db/tiki.sql SQL script on your database.
6. Edit (or create, if it does not exist) the file ../db/local.php to include the following:
   
   local.php

   
   <?php
   $db_tiki='mysqli';
   $dbversion_tiki='8.0';
   $host_tiki='localhost';
   $user_tiki='NAME OF YOUR DATABASE USER';
   $pass_tiki='PASSWORD FOR YOUR DATABASE USER';
   $dbs_tiki='NAME OF YOUR DATABASE';
   $client_charset='utf8';
   
   

Note: If the database is on a different machine then the webserver, replace localhost with the URL location of the database. By default, Tiki uses UTF-8 for your database encoding. If you select a different encoding method, you must change the $client_charset setting to match your database. See Creating the Database, below, for more information.

You should now be able to access your site and log in.

Tip: See http://doc.tikiwiki.org/Manual+Installation for additional details on performing a manual installation.

Creating the Database

When creating a new database for Tiki, be sure to set the database's collation and the MySQL connection collation correctly. Starting with Tiki 5, Tiki uses UTF-8 as the database charset.

Note: In some hosted environments, you may not be able to specify the collation. In that case, contact your webhost for details on selecting the correct collation type.

If Tiki detects that your database does not use the correct encoding, you can attempt to convert it to use UTF-8 encoding.

Warning: Be sure to backup your database before attempting the conversion.

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