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Installing Caribou CMS

Requirements

Before installing Caribou CMS, you will need to have a MySQL database created and privileges to access that database. This means that you need to know:

  • Your MySQL username,
  • Your MySQL password,
  • Your MySQL hostname (often localhost or the server IP address), and
  • Your MySQL database name.

As for the web server in which you intend to upload Caribou CMS, it will need to have IonCube loaders installed. These can be downloaded and installed by visiting http://www.ioncube.com/loaders.php. If you do not know how to install these or are not a server administrator, contact your server administrator and request these. Installation is simple and secure – all web hosting providers should easily accommodate this.

Of course, your hosting must also include support for PHP. Caribou will make various checks on the server during installation and warn you if the environment is not sufficient (with specific details and suggestions to help).

Caribou also requires that your web server can read .htaccess file and has mod_rewrite (or an equivalent) installed. This is how your URL’s become search engine-friendly in Caribou. Apache is the web server of choice.

Download Caribou CMS

New licensees should download the latest release of Caribou CMS from http://www.cariboucms.com. The download is a .zip archive containing a variety of folders, PHP files, CSS files, images, and HTML templates. In this download, you’ll find everything you need to get started with Caribou CMS (even a 30-day free trial license for a new domain).

Extract the contents of the .zip archive to a folder on your hard drive.

Upload the files to your web server

Connect to your server via FTP.

Most FTP clients are useable for uploading Caribou but, if you want a free option with the necessary options, try FileZilla at http://www.filezilla-project.org.

Set the file Transfer Mode to BINARY (Transfer > Transfer Type > Binary in FileZilla). Binary mode will keep the IonCube-encoded files from becoming corrupted during the upload.

Getting “file corrupted” errors when accessing your installation? This means that the files were not uploaded in BINARY mode. Re-upload /admincp/index.php and /includes/library.main.php in BINARY mode to fix the problem.

Access the Installation Wizard

Once the files are uploaded, simply load up your web browser and access the /install directory at the location you installed Caribou. So, if you wanted to run Caribou at example.com, access http://www.example.com/install. If you wanted to run Caribou from a sub-directory of a domain, access http://www.example.com/subdirectory/install.

From here, Caribou will walk you through database configuration, site configuration, file permissions setup, and a server requirements check.

If you receive errors during the server requirements check that aren’t fatal, they may be incorrect. Every server is different and, while Caribou does its best to sniff out versions and installed applications to check your environment, it can be wrong. The most common errors include Apache errors and mod_rewrite errors.

Delete the Installation directory

After the installation, all files in the /install directory must be deleted as they pose a serious security threat to your website and server. Caribou will allow you to access the control panel while these files still exist but an error will be displayed on your site’s frontend until they are deleted.

Create the update cronjob

Certain maintenance functions must be performed daily in order to keep your records accurate. The easiest way to perform these functions is to create a daily cronjob that executes /updatecron.php. This cronjob can be setup in any popular web hosting manager such as cPanel, Plesk, or Ensim. If a cronjob is not possible on your server, you can access Users > Update Subs in the control panel to perform the same maintenance functions.

Some people use a "php" call in the cronjob.  This would look like this if it were to run at 3am every morning.

0 3 * * * php /home/example.com/public_html/updatecron.php

If that isn't working (and it doesn't always work), you can use the "wget" command to load the script as if someone accessed it in their browser, like so:

0 3 * * * wget -q http://www.example.com/updatecron.php > /dev/null

That code will retrieve the page (run the script) and place whatever output occurs from the script into the trash at /dev/null.

In the first example, an absolute path to the file is given. This is just an example path. Another common variation is "/var/www/example.com/htdocs/updatecron.php". However, you should investigate with your web host what the absolute path to that file is. It will be the same absolute path as the documentroot setting for your Caribou installation.

Configure Caribou to your specifications

Now, Caribou is fully functioning but you still must configure the system to your needs. You can specify many settings such as your site’s name, email address, and different display properties in Administration > Settings in the control panel.

Before your product checkout works for shippable products, you must create a shipping method in Storefront > Shipping. Without a shipping method, checkouts will fail on the checkout page with a “Required field is missing” error.