Config.txt

Configuration options

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The main configuration file for StatusNet (excepting configurations for dependency software) is config.php in your StatusNet directory. If you edit any other file in the directory, like lib/default.php (where most of the defaults are defined), you will lose your configuration options in any upgrade, and you will wish that you had been more careful.

Starting with version 0.9.0, a Web based configuration panel has been added to StatusNet. The preferred method for changing config options is to use this panel.

A command-line script, setconfig.php, can be used to set individual configuration options. It's in the scripts/ directory.

Starting with version 0.7.1, you can put config files in the /etc/statusnet/ directory on your server, if it exists. Config files will be included in this order:


 * /etc/statusnet/statusnet.php - server-wide config
 * /etc/statusnet/ .php - for a virtual host
 * /etc/statusnet/ _ .php - for a path
 * INSTALLDIR/config.php - for a particular implementation

Almost all configuration options are made through a two-dimensional associative array, cleverly named $config. A typical configuration line will be:

$config['section']['option'] = value;

For brevity, the following documentation describes each section and option.

site

This section is a catch-all for site-wide variables.

name: the name of your site, like 'YourCompany Microblog'. server: the server part of your site's URLs, like 'example.net'. path: The path part of your site's URLs, like 'statusnet' or '' (installed in root). fancy: whether or not your site uses fancy URLs (see Fancy URLs   section above). Default is false. logfile: full path to a file for StatusNet to save logging information to. You may want to use this if you don't have access to syslog. logdebug: whether to log additional debug info like backtraces on   hard errors. Default false. locale_path: full path to the directory for locale data. Unless you store all your locale data in one place, you probably don't need to use this. language: default language for your site. Defaults to US English. Note that this is overridden if a user is logged in and has selected a different language. It is also overridden if the user is NOT logged in, but their browser requests a different langauge. Since pretty much everybody's browser requests a   language, that means that changing this setting has little or    no effect in practice. languages: A list of languages supported on your site. Typically you'd   only change this if you wanted to disable support for one or another language: "unset($config['site']['languages']['de'])" will disable support for German. theme: Theme for your site (see Theme section). Two themes are provided by default: 'default' and 'stoica' (the one used by   Identi.ca). It's appreciated if you don't use the 'stoica' theme except as the basis for your own. email: contact email address for your site. By default, it's extracted from your Web server environment; you may want to customize it. broughtbyurl: name of an organization or individual who provides the service. Each page will include a link to this name in the footer. A good way to link to the blog, forum, wiki, corporate portal, or whoever is making the service available. broughtby: text used for the "brought by" link. timezone: default timezone for message display. Users can set their own time zone. Defaults to 'UTC', which is a pretty good default. closed: If set to 'true', will disallow registration on your site. This is a cheap way to restrict accounts to only one individual or group; just register the accounts you want on   the service, *then* set this variable to 'true'. inviteonly: If set to 'true', will only allow registration if the user was invited by an existing user. private: If set to 'true', anonymous users will be redirected to the 'login' page. Also, API methods that normally require no   authentication will require it. Note that this does not turn off registration; use 'closed' or 'inviteonly' for the behaviour you want. notice: A plain string that will appear on every page. A good place to put introductory information about your service, or info about upgrades and outages, or other community info. Any HTML will be escaped. logo: URL of an image file to use as the logo for the site. Overrides the logo in the theme, if any. ssl: Whether to use SSL and https:// URLs for some or all pages. Possible values are 'always' (use it for all pages), 'never' (don't use it for any pages), or 'sometimes' (use it for   sensitive pages that include passwords like login and registration,    but not for regular pages). Default to 'never'. sslserver: use an alternate server name for SSL URLs, like 'secure.example.org'. You should be careful to set cookie parameters correctly so that both the SSL server and the "normal" server can access the session cookie and preferably other cookies as well. shorturllength: Length of URL at which URLs in a message exceeding 140 characters will be sent to the user's chosen shortening service. dupelimit: minimum time allowed for one person to say the same thing twice. Default 60s. Anything lower is considered a user or UI error. textlimit: default max size for texts in the site. Defaults to 140. 0 means no limit. Can be fine-tuned for notices, messages, profile bios and group descriptions.

db --

This section is a reference to the configuration options for DB_DataObject (see ). The ones that you may want to set are listed below for clarity.

database: a DSN (Data Source Name) for your StatusNet database. This is   in the format 'protocol://username:password@hostname/databasename', where 'protocol' is 'mysql' or 'mysqli' (or possibly 'postgresql', if you   really know what you're doing), 'username' is the username, 'password' is the password, and etc. ini_yourdbname: if your database is not named 'statusnet', you'll need to set this to point to the location of the statusnet.ini file. Note that the real name of your database should go in there, not literally 'yourdbname'. db_driver: You can try changing this to 'MDB2' to use the other driver type for DB_DataObject, but note that it breaks the OpenID libraries, which only support PEAR::DB. debug: On a database error, you may get a message saying to set this value to 5 to see debug messages in the browser. This breaks just about all pages, and will also expose the username and password quote_identifiers: Set this to true if you're using postgresql. type: either 'mysql' or 'postgresql' (used for some bits of   database-type-specific SQL in the code). Defaults to mysql. mirror: you can set this to an array of DSNs, like the above 'database' value. If it's set, certain read-only actions will use a random value out of this array for the database, rather than the one in 'database' (actually, 'database' is overwritten). You can offload a busy DB server by setting up MySQL replication and adding the slaves to this array. Note that if you want some requests to go to the 'database' (master) server, you'll need to include it in this array, too. utf8: whether to talk to the database in UTF-8 mode. This is the default with new installations, but older sites may want to turn it off until they get their databases fixed up. See "UTF-8 database" above for details. schemacheck: when to let plugins check the database schema to add tables or update them. Values can be 'runtime' (default) or 'script'. 'runtime' can be costly (plugins check the   schema on every hit, adding potentially several db    queries, some quite long), but not everyone knows how to    run a script. If you can, set this to 'script' and run scripts/checkschema.php whenever you install or upgrade a   plugin.

syslog --

By default, StatusNet sites log error messages to the syslog facility. (You can override this using the 'logfile' parameter described above).

appname: The name that StatusNet uses to log messages. By default it's   "statusnet", but if you have more than one installation on the server, you may want to change the name for each instance so   you can track log messages more easily. priority: level to log at. Currently ignored. facility: what syslog facility to used. Defaults to LOG_USER, only reset if you know what syslog is and have a good reason to change it.

queue -

You can configure the software to queue time-consuming tasks, like sending out SMS email or XMPP messages, for off-line processing. See 'Queues and daemons' above for how to set this up.

enabled: Whether to uses queues. Defaults to false. subsystem: Which kind of queueserver to use. Values include "db" for our hacked-together database queuing (no other server   required) and "stomp" for a stomp server. stomp_server: "broker URI" for stomp server. Something like "tcp://hostname:61613". More complicated ones are possible; see your stomp server's documentation for details. queue_basename: a root name to use for queues (stomp only). Typically something like '/queue/sitename/' makes sense. If running multiple instances on the same server, make sure that either this setting or $config['site']['nickname'] are unique for each site to keep them separate.

stomp_username: username for connecting to the stomp server; defaults to null. stomp_password: password for connecting to the stomp server; defaults to null.

stomp_persistent: keep items across queue server restart, if enabled. Under ActiveMQ, the server configuration determines if and how persistent storage is actually saved.

If using a message queue server other than ActiveMQ, you may need to disable this if it does not support persistence.

stomp_transactions: use transactions to aid in error detection. A broken transaction will be seen quickly, allowing a message to be redelivered immediately if a daemon crashes.

If using a message queue server other than ActiveMQ, you may need to disable this if it does not support transactions.

stomp_acks: send acknowledgements to aid in flow control. An acknowledgement of successful processing tells the server we're ready for more and can help keep things moving smoothly.

This should *not* be turned off when running with ActiveMQ, but if using another message queue server that does not support acknowledgements you might need to disable this.

softlimit: an absolute or relative "soft memory limit"; daemons will restart themselves gracefully when they find they've hit this amount of memory usage. Defaults to 90% of PHP's global memory_limit setting.

inboxes: delivery of messages to receiver's inboxes can be delayed to   queue time for best interactive performance on the sender. This may however be annoyingly slow when using the DB queues, so you can set this to false if it's causing trouble.

breakout: for stomp, individual queues are by default grouped up for best scalability. If some need to be run by separate daemons, etc they can be manually adjusted here.

Default will share all queues for all sites within each group. Specify as / or / / , using nickname identifier as site.

'main/distrib' separate "distrib" queue covering all sites 'xmpp/xmppout/mysite' separate "xmppout" queue covering just 'mysite'

max_retries: for stomp, drop messages after N failed attempts to process. Defaults to 10.

dead_letter_dir: for stomp, optional directory to dump data on failed queue processing events after discarding them.

stomp_no_transactions: for stomp, the server does not support transactions, so do not try to user them. This is needed for http://www.morbidq.com/.

stomp_no_acks: for stomp, the server does not support acknowledgements. so do not try to user them. This is needed for http://www.morbidq.com/.

license ---

The default license to use for your users notices. The default is the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which is probably the right choice for any public site. Note that some other servers will not accept notices if you apply a stricter license than this.

type: one of 'cc' (for Creative Commons licenses), 'allrightsreserved' (default copyright), or 'private' (for private and confidential   information). owner: for 'allrightsreserved' or 'private', an assigned copyright holder (for example, an employer for a private site). If   not specified, will be attributed to 'contributors'. url: URL of the license, used for links. title: Title for the license, like 'Creative Commons Attribution 3.0'. image: A button shown on each page for the license.

mail

This is for configuring out-going email. We use PEAR's Mail module, see: http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.mail.mail.factory.php

backend: the backend to use for mail, one of 'mail', 'sendmail', and 'smtp'. Defaults to PEAR's default, 'mail'. params: if the mail backend requires any parameters, you can provide them in an associative array.

nickname

This is for configuring nicknames in the service.

blacklist: an array of strings for usernames that may not be   registered. A default array exists for strings that are used by StatusNet (e.g. 'doc', 'main', 'avatar', 'theme') but you may want to add others if you have other software installed in a subdirectory of StatusNet or if you just don't want certain words used as usernames. featured: an array of nicknames of 'featured' users of the site. Can be useful to draw attention to well-known users, or   interesting people, or whatever.

avatar --

For configuring avatar access.

dir: Directory to look for avatar files and to put them into. Defaults to avatar subdirectory of install directory; if   you change it, make sure to change path, too. path: Path to avatars. Defaults to path for avatar subdirectory, but you can change it if you wish. Note that this will be included with the avatar server, too. server: If set, defines another server where avatars are stored in the root directory. Note that the 'avatar' subdir still has to be   writeable. You'd typically use this to split HTTP requests on   the client to speed up page loading, either with another virtual server or with an NFS or SAMBA share. Clients typically only make 2 connections to a single server at a   time , so this can parallelize the job. Defaults to null. ssl: Whether to access avatars using HTTPS. Defaults to null, meaning to guess based on site-wide SSL settings.

public --

For configuring the public stream.

localonly: If set to true, only messages posted by users of this service (rather than other services, filtered through OMB) are shown in the public stream. Default true. blacklist: An array of IDs of users to hide from the public stream. Useful if you have someone making excessive Twitterfeed posts to the site, other kinds of automated posts, testing bots, etc. autosource: Sources of notices that are from automatic posters, and thus should be kept off the public timeline. Default empty.

theme -

server: Like avatars, you can speed up page loading by pointing the theme file lookup to another server (virtual or real). Defaults to NULL, meaning to use the site server. dir: Directory where theme files are stored. Used to determine whether to show parts of a theme file. Defaults to the theme subdirectory of the install directory. path: Path part of theme URLs, before the theme name. Relative to the theme server. It may make sense to change this path when upgrading, (using version numbers as the path) to make sure that all files are reloaded by caching clients or proxies. Defaults to null, which means to use the site path + '/theme'. ssl: Whether to use SSL for theme elements. Default is null, which means guess based on site SSL settings.

javascript --

server: You can speed up page loading by pointing the theme file lookup to another server (virtual or real). Defaults to NULL, meaning to use the site server. path: Path part of Javascript URLs. Defaults to null, which means to use the site path + '/js/'. ssl: Whether to use SSL for JavaScript files. Default is null, which means guess based on site SSL settings.

xmpp

For configuring the XMPP sub-system.

enabled: Whether to accept and send messages by XMPP. Default false. server: server part of XMPP ID for update user. port: connection port for clients. Default 5222, which you probably shouldn't need to change. user: username for the client connection. Users will receive messages from 'user'@'server'. resource: a unique identifier for the connection to the server. This is actually used as a prefix for each XMPP component in the system. password: password for the user account. host: some XMPP domains are served by machines with a different hostname. (For example, @gmail.com GTalk users connect to   talk.google.com). Set this to the correct hostname if that's the case with your server. encryption: Whether to encrypt the connection between StatusNet and the XMPP server. Defaults to true, but you can get considerably better performance turning it off if you're   connecting to a server on the same machine or on a    protected network. debug: if turned on, this will make the XMPP library blurt out all of   the incoming and outgoing messages as XML stanzas. Use as a   last resort, and never turn it on if you don't have queues enabled, since it will spit out sensitive data to the browser. public: an array of JIDs to send _all_ notices to. This is useful for participating in third-party search and archiving services.

invite --

For configuring invites.

enabled: Whether to allow users to send invites. Default true.

tag ---

Miscellaneous tagging stuff.

dropoff: Decay factor for tag listing, in seconds. Defaults to exponential decay over ten days; you can twiddle with it to try and get better results for your site.

popular ---

Settings for the "popular" section of the site.

dropoff: Decay factor for popularity listing, in seconds. Defaults to exponential decay over ten days; you can twiddle with it to try and get better results for your site.

daemon --

For daemon processes.

piddir: directory that daemon processes should write their PID file (process ID) to. Defaults to /var/run/, which is where this stuff should usually go on Unix-ish systems. user: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective user ID   to this user before running. Probably a good idea, especially if   you start the daemons as root. Note: user name, like 'daemon', not 1001. group: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective group ID   to this named group. Again, a name, not a numerical ID.

memcached -

You can get a significant boost in performance by caching some database data in memcached .

enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false. server: a string with the hostname of the memcached server. Can also be an array of hostnames, if you've got more than one server. base: memcached uses key-value pairs to store data. We build long, funny-looking keys to make sure we don't have any conflicts. The base of the key is usually a simplified version of the site name (like "Identi.ca" => "identica"), but you can overwrite this if   you need to. You can safely ignore it if you only have one StatusNet site using your memcached server. port: Port to connect to; defaults to 11211.

emailpost -

For post-by-email.

enabled: Whether to enable post-by-email. Defaults to true. You will also need to set up maildaemon.php.

sms ---

For SMS integration.

enabled: Whether to enable SMS integration. Defaults to true. Queues should also be enabled.

integration ---

A catch-all for integration with other systems.

taguri: base for tag:// URIs. Defaults to site-server + ',2009'.

inboxes ---

For notice inboxes.

enabled: No longer used. If you set this to something other than true, StatusNet will no longer run.

throttle

For notice-posting throttles.

enabled: Whether to throttle posting. Defaults to false. count: Each user can make this many posts in 'timespan' seconds. So, if count is 100 and timespan is 3600, then there can be only 100 posts from a user every hour. timespan: see 'count'.

profile ---

Profile management.

biolimit: max character length of bio; 0 means no limit; null means to use the site text limit default.

newuser ---

Options with new users.

default: nickname of a user account to automatically subscribe new users to. Typically this would be system account for e.g.   service updates or announcements. Users are able to unsub if they want. Default is null; no auto subscribe. welcome: nickname of a user account that sends welcome messages to new users. Can be the same as 'default' account, although on   busy servers it may be a good idea to keep that one just for 'urgent' messages. Default is null; no message.

If either of these special user accounts are specified, the users should be created before the configuration is updated.

snapshot

The software will, by default, send statistical snapshots about the local installation to a stats server on the status.net Web site. This data is used by the developers to prioritize development decisions. No identifying data about users or organizations is collected. The data is available to the public for review. Participating in this survey helps StatusNet developers take your needs into account when updating the software.

run: string indicating when to run the statistics. Values can be 'web' (run occasionally at Web time), 'cron' (run from a cron script), or 'never' (don't ever run). If you set it to 'cron', remember to   schedule the script to run on a regular basis. frequency: if run value is 'web', how often to report statistics. Measured in Web hits; depends on how active your site is. Default is 10000 -- that is, one report every 10000 Web hits, on average. reporturl: URL to post statistics to. Defaults to StatusNet developers' report system, but if they go evil or disappear you may need to update this to another value. Note: if you don't want to report stats, it's much better to   set 'run' to 'never' than to set this value to something nonsensical.

attachments ---

The software lets users upload files with their notices. You can configure the types of accepted files by mime types and a trio of quota options: per file, per user (total), per user per month.

We suggest the use of the pecl file_info extension to handle mime type detection.

supported: an array of mime types you accept to store and distribute, like 'image/gif', 'video/mpeg', 'audio/mpeg', etc. Make sure you setup your server to properly recognize the types you want to   support. uploads: false to disable uploading files with notices (true by default). filecommand: The required MIME_Type library may need to use the 'file' command. It tries the one in the Web server's path, but if   you're having problems with uploads, try setting this to the correct value. Note: 'file' must accept '-b' and '-i' options.

For quotas, be sure you've set the upload_max_filesize and post_max_size in php.ini to be large enough to handle your upload. In httpd.conf (if you're using apache), check that the LimitRequestBody directive isn't set too low (it's optional, so it may not be there at all).

file_quota: maximum size for a single file upload in bytes. A user can send any amount of notices with attachments as long as each attachment is smaller than file_quota. user_quota: total size in bytes a user can store on this server. Each user can store any number of files as long as their total size does not exceed the user_quota. monthly_quota: total size permitted in the current month. This is the total size in bytes that a user can upload each month. dir: directory accessible to the Web process where uploads should go. Defaults to the 'file' subdirectory of the install directory, which should be writeable by the Web user. server: server name to use when creating URLs for uploaded files. Defaults to null, meaning to use the default Web server. Using a virtual server here can speed up Web performance. path: URL path, relative to the server, to find files. Defaults to   main path + '/file/'. ssl: whether to use HTTPS for file URLs. Defaults to null, meaning to   guess based on other SSL settings. filecommand: command to use for determining the type of a file. May be   skipped if fileinfo extension is installed. Defaults to   '/usr/bin/file'.

group -

Options for group functionality.

maxaliases: maximum number of aliases a group can have. Default 3. Set to 0 or less to prevent aliases in a group. desclimit: maximum number of characters to allow in group descriptions. null (default) means to use the site-wide text limits. 0   means no limit.

oohembed

oEmbed endpoint for multimedia attachments (links in posts).

endpoint: oohembed endpoint using http://oohembed.com/ software.

search --

Some stuff for search.

type: type of search. Ignored if PostgreSQL or Sphinx are enabled. Can either be 'fulltext' (default) or 'like'. The former is faster and more efficient but requires the lame old MyISAM engine for MySQL. The latter will work with InnoDB but could be miserably slow on large systems. We'll probably add another type sometime in the future, with our own indexing system (maybe like MediaWiki's).

sessions

Session handling.

handle: boolean. Whether we should register our own PHP session-handling code (using the database and memcache if enabled). Defaults to false. Setting this to true makes some sense on large or multi-server sites, but it probably won't hurt for smaller ones, either. debug: whether to output debugging info for session storage. Can help with weird session bugs, sometimes. Default false.

background --

Users can upload backgrounds for their pages; this section defines their use.

server: the server to use for background. Using a separate (even   virtual) server for this can speed up load times. Default is   null; same as site server. dir: directory to write backgrounds too. Default is '/background/' subdir of install dir. path: path to backgrounds. Default is sub-path of install path; note that you may need to change this if you change site-path too. ssl: Whether or not to use HTTPS for background files. Defaults to   null, meaning to guess from site-wide SSL settings.

ping

Using the "XML-RPC Ping" method initiated by weblogs.com, the site can notify third-party servers of updates.

notify: an array of URLs for ping endpoints. Default is the empty array (no notification).

design --

Default design (colors and background) for the site. Actual appearance depends on the theme. Null values mean to use the theme defaults.

backgroundcolor: Hex color of the site background. contentcolor: Hex color of the content area background. sidebarcolor: Hex color of the sidebar background. textcolor: Hex color of all non-link text. linkcolor: Hex color of all links. backgroundimage: Image to use for the background. disposition: Flags for whether or not to tile the background image.

notice --

Configuration options specific to notices.

contentlimit: max length of the plain-text content of a notice. Default is null, meaning to use the site-wide text limit. 0 means no limit.

message ---

Configuration options specific to messages.

contentlimit: max length of the plain-text content of a message. Default is null, meaning to use the site-wide text limit. 0 means no limit.

logincommand

Configuration options for the login command.

disabled: whether to enable this command. If enabled, users who send the text 'login' to the site through any channel will receive a link to login to the site automatically in return. Possibly useful for users who primarily use an XMPP or SMS interface and can't be bothered to remember their site password. Note that the security implications of this are pretty serious and have not been thoroughly tested. You should enable it only after you've convinced yourself that it is safe. Default is 'false'.

singleuser --

If an installation has only one user, this can simplify a lot of the interface. It also makes the user's profile the root URL.

enabled: Whether to run in "single user mode". Default false. nickname: nickname of the single user.

robotstxt -

We put out a default robots.txt file to guide the processing of Web crawlers. See http://www.robotstxt.org/ for more information on the format of this file.

crawldelay: if non-empty, this value is provided as the Crawl-Delay: for the robots.txt file. see http://ur1.ca/l5a0 for more information. Default is zero, no explicit delay. disallow: Array of (virtual) directories to disallow. Default is 'main', 'search', 'message', 'settings', 'admin'. Ignored when site is private, in which case the entire site ('/') is disallowed.

Plugins

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Beginning with the 0.7.x branch, StatusNet has supported a simple but powerful plugin architecture. Important events in the code are named, like 'StartNoticeSave', and other software can register interest in those events. When the events happen, the other software is called and has a choice of accepting or rejecting the events.

In the simplest case, you can add a function to config.php and use the Event::addHandler function to hook an event:

function AddGoogleLink($action) {       $action->menuItem('http://www.google.com/', _('Google'), _('Search engine')); return true; }

Event::addHandler('EndPrimaryNav', 'AddGoogleLink');

This adds a menu item to the end of the main navigation menu. You can see the list of existing events, and parameters that handlers must implement, in EVENTS.txt.

The Plugin class in lib/plugin.php makes it easier to write more complex plugins. Sub-classes can just create methods named 'onEventName', where 'EventName' is the name of the event (case matters!). These methods will be automatically registered as event handlers by the Plugin constructor (which you must call from your own class's constructor).

Several example plugins are included in the plugins/ directory. You can enable a plugin with the following line in config.php:

addPlugin('Example', array('param1' => 'value1', 'param2' => 'value2'));

This will look for and load files named 'ExamplePlugin.php' or 'Example/ExamplePlugin.php' either in the plugins/ directory (for plugins that ship with StatusNet) or in the local/ directory (for plugins you write yourself or that you get from somewhere else) or local/plugins/.

Plugins are documented in their own directories.