Installing Tips for Ushahidi on Mac and Amazon EC2

#1

Here some tips after I installed Ushahidi version "ushahidi-Ushahidi_Web-afb6ea4" on my test beds.

- iMac running Snow-Leopard (OSX 10.6.6)

- Amazon EC2 Cloud Server running a "Basic 32-bit Amazon Linux AMI"


1. Mac Installation

- I installed on the my local user site, which looks like

Code:
http://imac.local/~Felix/ushahidi/
.

- Make sure that you have
Code:
AllowOverride All
set in you
Code:
Felix.conf
(replace Felix with your user login name) in
Code:
/etc/apache2/users


- The Mac PHP installation normally comes without the mcrypt installed. So get it installed by following the instructions described here link

- Make sure that you get the correct php source version for compiling, type in a terminal
Code:
php -v


- Goto to the
Code:
/etc/php.init
file and set
Code:
zlib.output_compression=On
. If you are not doing that you get error messages like
Code:
cannot decode raw data” (NSURLErrorDomain:-1015)
(Safari) or
Code:
The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression
in Firefox. That took most time to figure out.

- Run the installation which sould complete successfully

- Finally I had to fix the Timezone problem as described in link

2. Amazon EC2

- Run
Code:
sudo yum install php-mcrypt
to get mcryp installed. Restart apache

- Enable compression in the php.ini see above

- Fixe the timezone problem when necessary

Off you go...

#2

On additional point for the EC2 installation:

run

Code:
yum -y install php-gd
to get Captcha in the comment section enabled

#3

Thanks this post helped a lot.


For the time zone error I'd recommend setting the time zone in your php.ini file like so:


[Date]

; Defines the default timezone used by the date functions

date.timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"


Replace "America/Los_Angeles" with your region/city combination.


This way you won't have to edit the core Kohana code every time you reinstall.