TWIKI installation report 23 Oct 2001

Environment:

• Windows NT
• XitamiWebServer
• ActivePerl
• GNU Grep,RCS,ls,diff -- from various sources. native executable.

My directory structure: Everything is under Z:\Web

• Z:\Web\Xitami contains XitamiWebserver
• Z:\Web\Perl contains ActivePerl
• Z:\Web\Bin contains needed tools
• Z:\Web\Twiki contains TWiki installation

Installaion

Install Xitami

• Destination directory: Z:\Web\Xitami
• I'll start it when needed

Install ActivePerl

• Location: Z:\Web\Perl
• Add perl to PATH -- unchecked
• associate .pl -- unchecked

Install TWiki ( using winzip)

Zip: TWiki20010901.zip

Extract to Z:\Web\TWiki

Extraction parameters: Use Folder Names.

Install GnuToolsForTWiki

Extract to z:\Web\Bin

Create start-up batch

Finally the last stage in installation, a simple batch file, go.bat:

path Z:\Web\Bin;Z:\Web\Perl\Bin;Z:\Web\Xitami;C:\Winnt;C:\Winnt\System32
set logname=Vardhan
start xiwin32

• Run go.bat
• X icon should appear in System Tray. This is Xitami web server
• Fire up browser and connect to http://localhost
• You should see Welcome to Xitami page.
• At the end of page checkout the 'Service Side include. It should work.

BTW testcgi doesn't work, you have to compile and place it in cgi-bin

Further configuration

TWiki.cfg ( use VIM / Emacs / Textpad / UltraEdit to edit. Notepad won't do )
Use your intelligence to edit most of these, but make sure these changes are here:

    $wikiHomeUrl      = "http://vardhan/twiki";
    $defaultUrlHost   = "http://vardhan";
    $pubDir           = "Z:/Web/TWiki/pub";
    $templateDir      = "Z:/Web/twiki/templates";
    $dataDir          = "Z:/Web/twiki/data";
    $rcsDir           = "z:/Web/Bin/";
    $lsCmd            = "Z:/Web/bin/ls";
    $egrepCmd         = "Z:/Web/bin/egrep";
    $fgrepCmd         = "Z:/Web/bin/fgrep";

run Z:\Web\Perl\Bin\Perl -Tw view in directory Z:\Web\TWiki\bin
This should give a big html page as output, and not "Module can't be located."

Xitami configuration

Xitami should be configured as :

• Change 'Url start with' to '/bin' instead of /cgi-bin
• define Alias: /twiki ==> Z:/Web/Twiki

After this http://localhost/twiki should give twiki's index.html.
Clicking on 'get started' should get you going.

Issues

• How to set LOGNAME properly for RCS ?

• I had a problem with Topic searches and displaying indices (See WebIndexDoesNotWork). I needed to modify the $safeEnvPath variable in TWiki.cfg. The setting was:
  $safeEnvPath "c:\\usr\\bin";
  I couldn't get things to work until I changed it to:
$safeEnvPath "c:\\usr\\bin;c:\\winnt\system32";
search.pm pipes the output of ls to egrep when doing topic searches, basically ls *.txt | egrep "\.*". It appears that piping relies on something in the system32 dir, probably cmd.exe, so system32 needs to be in the safe env path.
  • Using ActivePerl, cmd.exe is used as the shell whenever there are characters (e.g. '|') that prevent just directly running the command string - see CookbookActivePerlSetup for how to set it up to use CygWin's shell, which avoids this hassle. See also WindowsInstallCookbook, which has the same $safeEnvPath setup. -- RichardDonkin - 25 Feb 2002

-- JimEggleston - 28 Nov 2001

Send any comments to me. My email is at VardhanVarma.

-- VardhanVarma - 24 Oct 2001

Answers

Setting LOGNAME

Read The Friendly Manual http://localhost/xitami/index4.htm, in particular, the section titled "The [CGI-Environment] Section".

Please check whether this works as advertised, I've got enough time to download and install Xitami, but I don't have the time to do a thorough test.

Note that there are other environment variables that must be set to make rcs work properly.

-- JoachimDurchholz - 28 Nov 2001