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You do not need to worry about Elgg's technical requirements. We have already worried about that for you!!
1. Upload Elgg
Unzip Elgg and upload it to your site's document root.
2. Create a data folder
Elgg needs a special folder to store uploaded files, including profile icons and photos. You will need to create this for it.
We recommend that this folder is called data. For security reasons this should be stored outside of your document root. For example, if Elgg is installed in /home/elgg/html/, you might create it in/home/elgg/data.
Once this folder has been created, you'll need to make sure Elgg has permission to write to it. This shouldn't be a problem on Windows-based servers, but if your server runs Linux or a UNIX variant, you'll need to type something like:
chmod 777 /home/elgg/data/
If you use a graphical client to upload files, you can usually set this by right or shift-clicking on the folder and selecting 'properties'.
3. Create a database
Using your database administration tool of choice (if you're unsure about this, ask your system administrator), create a new database for Elgg. Make sure you know the username and password necessary to access this.
4. Visit your Elgg site
Once you've performed these steps, visit your Elgg site in your web browser. Elgg will take you through the rest of the installation process from there.
A note on settings and .htaccess
The Elgg installer will try and create two files for you:
- engine/settings.php, which contains the database settings for your installation
- .htaccess, which allows Elgg to generate dynamic URLs
If these files can't be automatically generated, for example because you don't have the correct directory permissions, Elgg will tell you how to create them. If, for some reason, this won't work, you will need to:
- Copy engine/settings.example.php to engine/settings.php, open it up in a text editor and fill in your database details
- Copy /htaccess_dist to /.htaccess
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