Noti installation guide

System Requirements

The Noti web interface requires the following:

• Apache
• PHP 4.1.0 or above
• Mysql 3.23.1 or above
• HTML_Form Pear package (you can install this very easily if you don't have it, read below)

Installation steps

Web interface

# Install the pear HTML_Form module typing the following commands: pear instal HTML_Form. If you don't have shell access, or if your hosting account does not allow you to do this, there are other (easy) ways to install the pear HTML_Form package (read below).

1. Download Noti from the Noti [http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=153156 download page]
2. Untar the downloaded file to the destination web folder. Example: tar zxf noti-X.X.X.tar.gz -C /var/www/html/ (X.X.X is the noti version you're using)
3. Move the /web direcrory (inside noti-X.X.X) to a web accesible location. Ex: mv /var/www/html/noti-X.X.X/web /var/www/html/noti
4. Copy the sample configuration file (config/noti.xml.dist) to config/noti.xml and change it. You have to set the mysql parameters (host, database, user and password) to suit your database connection, and maybe other options (like language and so). The configuration file is self-documented so you can find more information there. Another important option to edit is admins. Those are the list of users allowed to administer the Noti site (delete sites, manage users and setup category-area maps).
5. Go to http://www.notisite.com/noti/install.php (where www.notisite.com is the server where you installed Noti) and follow the installation steps. Note: You don't have to install Noti in the /noti folder (this is just an example). In order to complete the installation you must provide the root mysql user, or another user that hast the privileges to create databases. The Noti installer will create the database and setup permissions for Noti access. If you the webserver (apache) can write the directorey where you instelled noti (/var/www/html/noti in this example), then the installer will also create a hook to handle 404 error pages. Other you can do it yourself creating a .htacess file (/var/www/html/noti/.htaccess) and adding the following line to it: ErrorDocument 404 /var/www/html/noti/error-404.php
6. Once the install.php is finished you should have a ready to use Noti site.
7. Also, you must make sure that the config/noti.xml file can't be seen from a regular browser cause it contains your database username and password. Just point your browser to http://www.notisite.com/noti/config.xml and see what you get. You shouldn't be able to see it cause there's an .htaccess in the config directory that explicity forbids it (using the Deny from all directive) but there's a very small chance that your hosting compay (or apache installation, for that matter) may ignore this file.

Crawlers

To install the crawlers just untar de noti-X.X.X.tar.gz file and you'll find the crawlers in the /crawlers directory. The only requirement is to have python 2.3 (or above) installed. The crawlers are run through the ./fetchnews script (See NotiFetchnews for help).

You can use crontab to schedule periodic crawlings. One way is to add the following line to the /etc/crontab/ file:

0 * * * * root /usr/local/noti/crawlers/fetchnews

Fetchnews behaviour is configured through an XML file (like Noti web application). It comes with several crawlers ready for use (Observador, Espectador, Elpais, etc). Those are listed (and enabled by default) in the sample configuration file (crawlers/config.xml). So, in order to install it and make it work you only have to change the uploadurl option to point to your Noti site. For the example given above, that would be:

Additional notes

Installing Noti without shell access (hosting sites)

If your hosting provider doesn't give you shell accces to the server just untar noti on your local server and the upload it using [http://www.ncftp.com/ ncftpput], for example.

Installing Noti without pear

If you don't have pear on your system, or you don't have access to the system pear package manager, just download the last pear HTML_Form file from [http://pear.php.net/package/HTML_Form/download here] and upload it to a folder named HTML under the directory where you previously upload Noti.

Example using FTP:

wget http://pear.php.net/get/HTML_Form-1.3.0.tgz
cd HTML_Form-1.3.0/HTML/

ftp notidomain.com
( login ... )

cd noti
mkdir HTML
put Form.php