Gallery1:Installation Requirements - Gallery Codex
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Gallery1:Installation Requirements

From Gallery Codex

Gallery has certain technical requirements that must be met (i.e. installed and/or configured) on your server before you attempt to install it.

Platform

Gallery is a web based software product that lets you manage your photos on your own website. Gallery runs on both Unix (including *BSD, Linux, ...) and Windows platforms.

Unsupported platforms: Users have experienced a great deal of difficulty getting Gallery to run properly on Win98, WinME and IIS. As a result, we do not support those platforms! Sorry, but there are only so many hours in a day, we do this for free and we don't have time to support every platform.

RedHat 9.0 Users: You need to verify your Apache and PHP versions, because by default !RedHat uses Apache 2 and PHP 4.2 which are incompatible. See the above note for Apache 2 users.

Web Server

Apache

Apache is the most popular web server in the world, and is the one recommended by the Gallery Team for use with Gallery. It can be downloaded from the Apache HTTPD Project's site

Apache2 Note: The first officially supported version of PHP on Apache2 is PHP 4.3.0. If you're having problems on Apache2 and you're not running PHP 4.3.0, you must upgrade (or we can't help you).

IIS

Microsoft's IIS (Internet Information Services) web server has also been known to work. However, the Gallery Team does not officially support the use of IIS, due to certain known difficulties with this platform. Generally, if you do not have Administrator access to the machine running IIS, it will either be extremely difficult or impossible to install Gallery. As a general rule, installing Gallery in a IIS hosted environment is not likely to succeed.

Zeus, ...

There are a lot of alternative web servers. Gallery 1.x should work on any web server that can run PHP. But short URLs (mod_rewrite) is probably not supported by all of them. Gallery 1.x is known to work with:

  • Zeus Web Server on Linux and HP-UX 11
  • Yellow Tip Web Server on Windows NT, 200x and XP

PHP

Gallery is written in PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Processor). It is one of the most popular, free web-based languages in the world today. If it's not already installed on your webserver, it can also be downloaded gratis from the PHP Project's site.

Gallery requires at least version 4.1.0 to function properly

PHP Settings

In addition to a basic PHP installation, Gallery requires certain PHP settings to be setup correctly in order to function optimally

PHP settings can be changed in php.ini, as described in the PHP documentation

  • safe_mode safe_mode must be disabled in order for Gallery to work correctly
  • disable_functions The disable_functions directive must not include the function exec
  • file_uploads file_uploads must be set to On if Gallery is to be able to upload files from your computer

alindeman has created a script to check your Gallery for potential problems due to PHP settings. Once you have downloaded Gallery, you can run the script in http://www.example.com/gallery/setup/ghcc.php. If any tests fail, you may need to adjust your settings before trying to install Gallery.

Image Processing Library

Gallery requires either NetPBM or ImageMagick in order to operate on (e.g. resize) your images and photographs.

More information on how to install an image processing library is explained on Installing an Image Processing Library

Optional Items

mod_rewrite

mod_rewrite is an Apache server extension that enables your Gallery to use "short URLs." That is, instead of http://www.example.com/gallery/albums.php?set_AlbumName=nameOfAlbum, the URL would be reduced to http://www.example.com/gallery/nameOfAlbum. Gallery will attempt to automatically check for the presence of mod_rewrite during the Configuration Wizard

jhead

jhead is a free tool that can be used to extract EXIF data from images, which most digital cameras now add to photos. If enabled, EXIF data will be available for viewing by clicking on the [properties] link by individual images.

exiftags

exiftags is an alternative tool to jhead. The exiftags utility parses a specified JPEG file or, by default, its standard input, looking for a JPEG APP1 section containing EXIF (Exchangeable Image File) image metadata. The properties contained in these data are then printed to the standard output. Digital cameras typically add EXIF data to the image files they produce, containing information about the camera and digitized image.

infozip

infozip is a free tool that allows Gallery to unzip ZIP archives so that you can easily upload multiple photos. If enabled, you will be able to upload a ZIP archive as you would any other single picture, and Gallery will add all the images in the archive.

jpegtran

jpegtran is a free tool that allows Gallery to losslessly rotate JPEG images. While NetPBM and ImageMagick can rotate JPEG images, jpegtran allows you to rotate images without risking degradation.

How to find out what you have:

To find out which version of Apache and PHP is installed, the "phpinfo.php" file in the setup directory of Gallery will display this. Use your Gallery URL (see [Configuration]) and append "setup/phpinfo.php". Like this: http://www.example.com/gallery/gallery/setup/phpinfo.php. This file is accessible only when Gallery is still in configure mode (or freshly copied to the server).