Installing Act on your system

Install (or svn checkout) Act in a directory. In this document we'll use /home/act, and refer to it as Act's home directory.

The required modules are tested for in t/01cpan.t. You'll find the complete and up-to-date list of prerequisites in that file.

First thing is to enable Perl (and mod_perl) to find the Act modules.

    export PERL5LIB=/home/act/lib

Act needs to know its home directory so that it can find its configuration file. This is done by setting the ACTHOME environment variable:

    export ACTHOME=/home/act

Make sure both ACTHOME and PERL5LIB are set and exported when running httpd or 'make test': include these settings in both your shell profile (~/.bashrc or equivalent) and Apache startup script (apachectl or equivalent.)

Next, define a virtual host in your Apache configuration file (httpd.conf) for Act. Here's an example:

    <VirtualHost *>
      ServerName   localhost
      ServerAdmin  webmaster@example.com
      DocumentRoot /home/act/wwwdocs
      Include      /home/act/conf/httpd.conf
    </VirtualHost>

For code development it is useful to install the Apache::Reload module. Enable it in httpd.conf (outside of any VirtualHost containers):

    PerlModule Apache::Reload
    PerlInitHandler Apache::Reload
    PerlSetVar ReloadAll Off

Then add this inside Act's VirtualHost container:

    PerlSetVar ReloadModules "Act::*"

If you don't want to mess with name-based virtual hosts and DNS, an easy setup is to use a port-based virtual host:

    Listen 9000
    <VirtualHost *:9000>
      Port 9000
      ServerName   localhost
      ServerAdmin  webmaster@example.com
      DocumentRoot /home/act/wwwdocs
      Include      /home/act/conf/httpd.conf
    </VirtualHost>

Create the directory where photos will be uploaded, by default $ACTHOME/wwwdocs/photos. Make sure it is readable by all, and writable by the user running Apache.

Next, create a local configuration file in $ACTHOME/conf/local.ini. This file is not part of the distribution: its contents override the global settings in $ACTHOME/conf/act.ini. If you have no need to override these standard settings, local.ini isn't needed.

You are now ready to install and configure the database system. See the details in database/INSTALL.<db> (where <db> is one of Pg, MySQL....)

In the end, you must have the following section in your conf/act.ini or conf/local.ini file:

    [database]
    dsn    = <dsn>
    user   = <db user>
    passwd = <db password>

To make sure that your system has all the requirements to run Act, and that Act works correctly on it, you can now run Act's test suite. This test suite requires Test::More.

    cd $ACTHOME
    make test

Adding a new conference

Decide the name of your conference. We'll use act-2004 as an example.

  $ACTHOME/
      actdocs/
        act-2004/
          conf/             # local configuration
          static/           # "static" multilingual .html pages
          templates/        # local templates or global overrides
      wwwdocs/              # static files
          photos/           # user photos (general_dir_photos conf item)
          act-2004/
              css/
              images/

Several forms used by Act used the WRAPPER "ui" for adding the local look&feel. The name "ui" is therefore the standard template for redefining the user interface.

If you plan to modify some default templates, you should copy/paste* them to the local templates/ directory.