Web Design and Technologies (4004-737)


In-Class Exercise: Installing Movable Type (posted 1 December 2003)

1) Telnet (or secure shell) to grace, and use pwd to find the full path to your home directory (you’ll need this later, so write it down). Mine is /users/rit0/g1/ellics, but yours will be slightly different.

2) If one doesn’t already exist, create an .suexec file in www directory. (The presence of this file allows the web server to run CGI programs as “you,” so that you don’t have to give write permissions to the whole world.)

3) You’re going to need three directories—one in your home directory to hold the database files, and two in your www directory for the movable type program files and the blog itself. In the examples below, the database directory is called db, the movable type program directory is called mt, and the blog directory is called blog. You can call these whatever you want. The permissions on all three directories must be set to 755.

(If you use the example directory names, the path to log into your blog for editing and configuration would be http://www.rit.edu/~yourid/mt/ , and the path to read your blog would be http://www.rit.edu/~yourid/blog/)

When done, log out from grace.

4) Download the full version (with libraries) of Movable Type, and decompress it locally with unstuffit or winzip.

5) Edit the mt.cfg file using a good text editor (e.g. BBEdit or UltraEdit). Make sure the program is set to save the files with UNIX line breaks, to avoid problems when uploading. (More detailed information on the configuration file can be found in the Movable Type installation documentation, on their web site. This is an abbreviated, RIT web server version of the instructions).

  • change the CGIPath variable to be http://www.rit.edu/~yourid/mt/ (if you chose a different name for the movable type file directory, use it here)
  • change the DataSource line to show the full directory path to your db directory (e.g. /users/rit0/g1/yourid/db), substituting your path from step 1, and the name you gave your db directory
  • Uncomment the following lines in the file by removing the # from in front of them.
DBUmask 0022
HTMLUmask 0022
UploadUmask 0022
DirUmask 0022

6) Edit all files ending with .cgi to include the proper path to perl (/usr/local/bin/perl). (The only exception is the mt-db-pass.cgi file, which does not need to be edited.)

7) Use an FTP program to upload all files and directories in the distribution directory to the movable type directory you created. Most FTP programs will properly set the directories to 755 and the files to 644, but you probably want to check to make sure that’s the case for the mt directories.

8) Using your FTP program, or a telnet/secure shell connection, change the permissions on the .cgi files to make them executable (chmod 755 *.cgi)

9) Open a browser and run the mt-check program to test the installation:
http://www.rit.edu/~yourid/mt/mt-check.cgi

If mt-check.cgi is successful, run the mt-load program to initialize the software
http://www.rit.edu/~yourid/mt/mt-load.cgi

(Substitute the name of your movable type directory if you didn’t use mt)

If mt-load runs properly, delete the file so it can’t be re-run.

10) Use a browser to go to http://www.rit.edu/~yourid/mt/mt.cgi and log in with the default values—user Melody, password Nelson. Immediately edit your profile to change the user name and password to what you want. (The user name will be what shows up on your posts, so choose something you’d like to be “public”.)

Comments & Trackbacks
Trackback Link: http://www.it.rit.edu/~ell/mt/mt-tb.cgi/615

Me thinks we should all blogroll each other after we get our MovableType's installed.

Posted by: Robert on December 3, 2003 07:41 PM | Permalink to Comment

I'll create a class blogroll next week, and provide the code to all of you.

Posted by: Liz Lawley on December 3, 2003 07:42 PM | Permalink to Comment

ANyone know why I keep getting this error message...

"Loading initial data into system...

An error occurred while loading data:

Your DataSource directory ('Users/rit6/g2/src6610/db') does not exist."


When I made the dir of db in my home directory....??

Thanks

Stephanie

Posted by: Stephanie R. Chester on December 4, 2003 01:24 AM | Permalink to Comment

Maybe the problem lies in setting up the text file to save the file mt.cfg with unix line break, which I am not sure how to do.....cant find any configuration on ultra to do such....

Posted by: Stephanie R. Chester on December 4, 2003 02:21 AM | Permalink to Comment

NEVER MIND....I figured it out after half the night working on it....I realized the User in the ummm DB path had a capital U.....so that pretty much messed me up til i made the U lower case!!! Boy, what a waste of time over a little human error *chuckles* but at least I learned a lot from playing around with Unix, permissions, ftp, etc trying to resolve the problem - sort of refreshing my memory cuz its been awhile!!! Now they all are easy as ABC, once again!! *chuckles*

Posted by: Stephanie R. Chester on December 4, 2003 02:35 AM | Permalink to Comment

Ok...me again....now i am getting this error

"Loading initial data into system...
Loading weblog...

An error occurred while loading data:

Tie '/users/rit6/g2/src6610/db/blog.db' failed: Permission denied"

Even though I was able to get mt.cgi to run to the user name create web page, I cant intilize the software installation with mt/mt-load.cgi without keep coming across the above error message - and I did set permission for the DB dir to 755 and rechecked it numerous times!!! HELP....

Thanks!!

Posted by: Stephanie R. Chester on December 4, 2003 02:47 AM | Permalink to Comment

Stephanie,

Are there a whole bunch of files in your db dir? (I'm not sure which step of the process actually places them in the directory). If there are, check the permissions on them. All of the files in my db directory are -rw-r--r--, including blog.db. Perhaps the permissions for the directory are ok, but not for the individual files.

Aaron

Posted by: Aaron Sanders on December 5, 2003 10:35 AM | Permalink to Comment

I continue to receive error messages when trying to run mt-load.cgi. Can anybody offer some insight? default-templates.pl has been placed in the folder already.

Thank you,

Vince

An error occurred while loading data:

Can't find default template list; where is 'default-templates.pl'?
Error: Can't locate MT/default-templates.pl in @INC (@INC contains: ./extlib ./lib /acclib/perl5/lib/5.00503/alpha-dec_osf /acclib/perl5/lib/5.00503 /acclib/perl5/lib/site_perl/5.005/alpha-dec_osf /acclib/perl5/lib/site_perl/5.005 .) at mt-load.cgi line 30.

Posted by: Vince on December 5, 2003 07:39 PM | Permalink to Comment

Vince, Double check you did step #5

5) Edit the mt.cfg file:

change the CGIPath variable to be http://www.rit.edu/~yourid/mt/ (double check case too)


change the DataSource line to show the full directory path to your db directory (e.g. /users/ritX/gX/yourid/db

Uncomment the following lines in the file by removing the # from in front of them.
DBUmask 0022
HTMLUmask 0022
UploadUmask 0022
DirUmask 0022

skip this one
6) Edit all files ending with .cgi to .....


Last make sure you directory structure is

acb1234 (root)
|->db, www
            |
            |->mt, blog

hth

Posted by: cher on December 6, 2003 04:37 PM | Permalink to Comment

Thank you for the information. There was a problem with the directory structure.

Posted by: Vince on December 6, 2003 06:12 PM | Permalink to Comment

After making an entry to my blog today, the first entry of the new year, I no longer see the old entries I had. The only way I can access them is under Recent Entries and Archive. How can I get them back on my home page ?

Posted by: joe carino on January 4, 2004 04:59 PM | Permalink to Comment

Joe, the default blog settings are to show only the past 7 days of entries. You can change that in the weblog config-->preferences screen.

Posted by: Liz Lawley on January 4, 2004 05:44 PM | Permalink to Comment

Prof. Lawley,

I would like to move my course blog from rit server to my personal server since grace seem to be so much slower than the personal server that I use. I will keep the very first assignment (the one ungraded) on the grace account and will update the link to my blog page there.

I would very much appreciate if you can let me know whether this is okay.

The original blog url:
http://www.rit.edu/~fxt1998/blog/

The new blog url:
http://rit.takegawa.net/4004737/

Thanks.

Posted by: Fuyuko Takegawa on January 6, 2004 11:35 PM | Permalink to Comment
Trackback from 4004-737 Weblog: Fuyuko Takegawa

Excerpt: RIT server is really slow...takes forever to rebuild this blog...so I decided to move this blog to another server. Here is the link to the new location. For those of you who've been checking on me and my site, I...
Read More: I Moved This Blog To Another Server

Posted Jan 7, 2004 6:56 PM