OS : OS independent

Web Server : Apache 1.3+ (configured with AllowOverride All for directory where you plan to place your project)

Development Environment : PHP 4.2+ (folks say it works with 4.2+, yet we prefer 4.3+)

Preferred Database : MySQL 4.0+ (Limb will work on 3.23+ with InnoDB support, however Limb uses full text search capabilities of 4.0+ version)

Download the latest package of the Limb2 from Sourceforge.net (You need at least an empty Limb based project and Limb itself).

Unpack them somewhere on your hard drive, where you plan to store your website. Let's assume that project's directory is called PROJECT_DIR and Limb directory is called LIMB_DIR.

Connect to the MySQL server and create a database for your project. You can find a dump file in PROJECT_DIR/init/init_en.sql (or init_ru.sql if you want to have Russian as the main language. Only English and Russian dumps are available at the moment).

If you want to test your installation (and we highly recommend this) you need also to create database for testing purposes and fill it with PROJECT_DIR/init/init_tests.sql

It's common to call testing database the same name as a production one with '-tests' postfix in the end. The database configuration can be setup in PROJECT_DIR/tests/setup.php or, which is preferable, in PROJECT_DIR/tests/setup.override.php

Please note that your testing database must be different from your production database, you don't want to ruin real data, do you?

Setup your virtual host settings for the project. For Apache it might look something like that:

  #project settings
  <VirtualHost 127.0.0.1>
    DocumentRoot PROJECT_DIR
    ServerName your_project_name
    ErrorLog logs/your_project_name_dev-error.log
    CustomLog logs/your_project_name_dev-access.log common
    Alias /shared LIMB_DIR/shared/
  </VirtualHost>

If you don't have the permission to directly modify the httpd.conf just copy LIMB_DIR/shared directory to PROJECT_DIR/shared

Assuming that the previous steps have been done successfully, it's time to customize the Limb2 based empty project. Find PROJECT_DIR/setup.override.php and «re-define» necessary constants(this not really a re-defining of constants, the trick is that setup.override.php is included the first). If there's no such a file, create it using PROJECT_DIR/setup.override.php-example:

• LIMB_DIR - path to Limb
• DB_HOST - hostname or ip address of your's database server
• DB_LOGIN - login for database
• DB_PASSWORD - password for database
• DB_NAME - database name
• DEVELOPER_EMAIL - project developer email (Limb tries to send error messages on project to that email, it's useful when you support remote project)
• ADMINISTRATOR_EMAIL - project administrator email. (Default email to send messages from site)

Please note there's a bunch of other miscellaneous options. Comments next to every one should make clear their meaning.

Set write permissions for PROJECT_DIR/var, PROJECT_DIR/media directories for user your webserver is running with.

SimpleTest is not bundled with Limb 2.3+ any more. You have to download, unpack and setup SimpleTest in order to run Limb tests.

• Download the latest version of SimpleTest from SourceForge.net
• Unpack it
• In PROJECT_DIR/tests/setup.php file you have to modify SIMPLE_TEST constant value properly.

} It's time to rock'n'roll! To run the tests you should set the write permission for the web-server on PROJECT_DIR/tests/var directory as you did for PROJECT_DIR/var. Now proceed with your browser to «http://you-project-name/tests» (remember how we defined the virtual host?) and run all tests(it may take some time)… If you have the notorious «green bar» in the end you're ready to develop with Limb

That should be it. If you properly did all operations then project should actually work. To check this, please run the tests.

Here's also a list of the most frequent installation troubleshooting issues.