Installation instructions for PunBB 1.1.1

This document includes installation and upgrade instructions for PunBB 1.1.1. If you are upgrading from 1.1, skip to section 3.

1. Requirements

• A webserver (preferably Apache).
• PHP 4.1.0 or later (PHP 5 included).
• MySQL 3.23.17 or later or PostgreSQL 7.0 or later (see details below).

MySQL: PunBB will not work at all with any version prior to 3.23.17.

PostgreSQL: PunBB 1.1 has only been tested on version 7.3.3 of PostgreSQL, but it should work fine with any version greater than 7.0. Please note that PHP 4.2.0 or later is required for PostgreSQL support.

2. Installation

Copy/upload all contents of the directory upload/ into the directory where you want to run your forums. Run install.php from the forum root directory through your browser. Follow the instructions. If you get an error when trying to upload avatar images, make sure that the webserver user has write access to the directory where you store avatars (default is img/avatars/). Please report any problems you might encounter during installation in the forums at http://forums.punbb.org/.

3. Upgrading from 1.1

Follow these instructions to update your current 1.1 installation to 1.1.1. It is recommended that the forum be put into maintenance mode (Admin/Options) during the update procedure.

NOTE: Make backups before proceeding! Use the tool mysqldump for MySQL and pg_dump for PostgreSQL. Also backup any CSS (style/) and template files (include/template/) that you have made changes to.

1. Update all scripts and files to 1.1.1. This is easily done by extracting the 1.1.1 archive into the same directory as your old installation (overwriting any existing files).
2. Copy/upload the script 11_to_111_update.php from the directory scripts/ to the forum root directory and run it through your browser. A message will appear when the update process has completed. Once the update script has finished you should remove the script from the forum root directory.

You should now be running PunBB 1.1.1.

4. Maximizing performance

Here are some recommendations for maximizing the performance of PunBB. The recommendations are not directly related to PunBB performance. They are very general and results may vary.

• Run it in a UNIX-like operating system!
• Use the Apache webserver and compile PHP as a static module for Apache.
• Use a PHP cache/accelerator tool. I recommend Turck MMCache.
• Make sure that PHP has zlib support so you can enable gzip output compression in Admin/Options. This greatly reduces the size of the HTML output at the cost of a little CPU time. An alternative is to use the Apache module mod_gzip. The two methods yield similar results.
• Visit the administration interface and disable any forum features that are not used or you feel are unnecessary.

Thank you for using PunBB!

Rickard Andersson
rickard@punbb.org
http://www.punbb.org/