The magical DreamHost one-click installers !
When I came up with the idea of making a website where technology and art would collide into several projects, I knew from first second that it would be great to have a weblog following the creation of this thing on a technical point of view as well as a wiki which would serve as a global repository of knowledge, and which would provide some more in-depth information on technical matters.
So I was already picturing me writing a blog post about how I fought to get WordPress installed properly on a linux hosted environment, and a wiki page with the detailed technical process of transfering the files to the account over ssh, setting the permissions, editing some configuration files, etc.
Well. not this time. DreamHost has that excellent feature already pre-built in. And a wiki too. And a lot more.
In the Control Panel, the one click installs are located under Goodies/One-Click Installs.
At the time of redacting, there is the following apps available (this is for the basic plan) :
(v2.1) . The very blogging application that powers up this blog.
(v2.1.2) . To display photo galleries as its name suggests.
(v1.3.7) . To easily set up an e-shop
(v1.0.12) . Powerful CMS
(v2.0.22) . To host a forum
(v1.9.2) (PHP 5 domain required) . The wikimedia engine.
(v0.7.1) (PHP 5 domain required) . Probably to collaborate online
(v1.0.4) (PHP 4 domain required) . Publish calendars
(v2.03) (PHP 4 domain required) . Get some polls on your website.
(Remotely Hosted) . Not sure about that one. Netvibes like ?
To install one of those apps :
- select it
- fill in the URL where would you like your software to be installed to
- fill in MySQL database infos
Some of this is already pre-filled by DreamHost and is foolproof (you cannot instal software under someone else’s domain). You have unlimited databases, so you can create one per app you install. This is very easy.
Now, as you can see, some of the apps have a requirement on a specific version of PHP. By default, when your DreamHost account is set up, you have a PHP4 domain.
I first installed WordPress and started to play with my blog a little. Then I wanted to set up a Wiki to store technical datas (like a usefull .vimrc configuration file for instance). I had to switch to a PHP5 enabled domain. I was afraid that my blog would be blown up after this, but no, it didn’t and stayed perfectly functional.
The switching operation itself is very simple :
- In the control panel, open the Domains->Manage Domains menu.
Here you have a list of your hosted domains at DreamHost. You probably have only one. There is a row named “Web Hosting”. And an edit link for each hosted domain. The edit link leads to a page where you can manage your hosting options.
Here you can switch from PHP4 to PHP5 support.
Extra Web Security? was checked. I kept it.
I left FastCGI Support? unchecked since I don’t need it for now. This is kind of advanced stuff so I recommand you read DreamHost FastCGI wiki explanation if you really want to turn that on. I’ll probably get back to this later if I need it.
In a matter of minutes, I was PHP5 enabled. And MediaWiki was just as easy to install as WordPress. I’ll come back to specific post-installation operations on WordPress and MediaWiki in subsequent posts.
But in about 10 minutes, I had a blog and a wiki all set up on my domain. How can this be more great !?
