Installation: Mac OS X
This guide will give you the basics for getting all the necessary components working so that you can successfully install and make configuration changes for the ThinkUp app as a local application on your Mac.
- Assumptions
- Needed Tools
- Install MAMP
- Configure MAMP
- Where does ThinkUp go?
- Configure ThinkUp
- Install ThinkUp
- Other Notes
- You are running at least OS X 10.5.8
- You have administrator access on your machine.
- You can find the Terminal app and copy/paste some commands.
- You can edit some text-based files.
- Good text editor. I prefer TextWrangler (http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/), but any decent text editor will do. Stay away from editors that put their own formatting on like Word or Pages. You want to work with text only files!
- The MAMP package (http://www.mamp.info/). MAMP will make it easy to install and configure Apache (web server), MySQL (database) and PHP (code engine) on your local machine. You don’t need MAMP Pro. The basic version has everything necessary.
- Terminal application to access the command line. There are some 3rd party applications that give you some more control, but I use the Terminal app that ships with OS X.
Download the most recent version of MAMP, unzip the file somewhere you can find it, and double-click on the .dmg file. You should see a screen that looks something like this:
Figure 1.1 MAMP Install Screen
Click and drag the MAMP folder icon to the Applications folder icon to install MAMP. When that finishes, you should have a MAMP directory listing under Applications.
Figure 1.2 MAMP Directory listing
Double click on the MAMP application to start MAMP – this will automatically launch the Apache and MySQL servers. It will also load the MAMP start page in your browser.
Figure 1.3 MAMP Application Control Window
Figure 1.4 MAMP Start Page
From the start page, you can navigate to the PHPinfo screen to see what versions of software MAMP has configured and installed. You will also be able to go to PHPMyAdmin and create your database table for ThinkUp, which we will cover in the next section!
Click on PHPMyAdmin on the MAMP start page (it is located in the bar near the top of the page, under the logo).
Figure 2.1 MAMP PHPMyAdmin Page
Go to the area “Create New Database”. Type tt_thinkup_db in the text box and click the Create button.
Figure 2.2 Create ThinkUp Database
A brief word on security: MAMP installs with default passwords. This install guide is not yet going to go through the process of changing passwords, because that could potentially make it more difficult to install ThinkUp. Eventually, we will try to add in that process. If you are going to try and expose your computer to the outside world, you REALLY need to change these to something more secure.
TODO: Changing passwords in MAMP & setting up the config files to recognize the new passwords.
Grab the most recent install of ThinkUp (ThinkUp-0.1.zip as of Sept 28, 2010). You can also follow the instructions for setting up Git (About: Working with ThinkUp and Git) to stay up to date with the most recent version.
For the purposes of this documentation, we will assume that you have chose to get the most recent archive directly from the downloads section.
Unzip the ThinkUp-0.1.zip file to the htdocs folder of MAMP (/applications/MAMP/htdocs). The htdocs folder should look like this when you’re done:
Figure 3.1 ThinkUp unzip
Before we install ThinkUp, we need to change the permissions on the ThinkUp folder in htdocs. Launch the terminal app and type the following:
chmod -R 777 /applications/mamp/htdocs/thinkup/ then hit return. This makes sure that all files and folders in the ThinkUp folder will have full read, write and execute access.
Open your favorite web browser and go to this address:
http://127.0.0.1:8888/thinkup/install/
That will start you on the process for installing ThinkUp.
After install, open config.inc.php in your text editor of choice and add this line:
$THINKUP_CFG['repair'] = true; somewhere before the end of the file and save the file. This will future-proof your install for any database repairs.
- I have tested all this using OS X 10.5.8 – things may vary slightly in Snow Leopard. If anyone finds that something is different in Snow Leopard, please annotate these instructions where appropriate.
- Now that you have installed ThinkUp locally, you will need to follow the instructions for authorizing your ThinkUp app for twitter. Instructions can be found at http://github.com/ginatrapani/ThinkUp/wiki/Installation:-Local-Computer.