Ascent Installation Instructions

Please note that ASCENT_INSTALL in the following documentation refers to the directory you have installed ascent into. For example, if you have a /webs directory, and you install ascent into it, then any reference to ASCENT_INSTALL is referring to /webs/ascent for your system.

  1. Untar the distribution tarball
  2. Create the database backend by running one of the ASCENT_INSTALL/db/DBTYPE/ascent*.sql files, where DBTYPE is a directory that corresponds to the database engine you will be using (currently that means MySQL).
    Example:
    mysql -u root -p < ascent_MyISAM.sql
    • NOTES:
    • MySQL supports a number of table types, and so does ascent. If you will be using a MySQL backend, you have the choice of using ascent_InnoDB.sql or ascent_MyISAM.sql.
    • If you use the ascent_InnoDB.sql file, ascent will be created with InnoDB tables, and you will be able to take advantage of the improvements that come with that (for example, row level locks, foreign key relationships, etc). If you use the ascent_MyISAM.sql file, ascent will be created with the MySQL standard table type.
    • If you do not understand what the difference is, it is recommended that you stick with the ascent_MyISAM.sql file, as using InnoDB requires additional configuration of the MySQL environment not covered here.

  3. Copy the file ASCENT_INSTALL/cfg/config.dist.php to ASCENT_INSTALL/cfg/config.inc.php
    Example:
    cp /webs/ascent/cfg/config.dist.php /webs/ascent/cfg/config.inc.php
  4. Edit the ASCENT_INSTALL/cfg/config.inc.php file and customize it for your site.
  5. If you want to use Active Directory authentication, you will need to enable the ADAUTH setting in the config file. You will also need to edit the ASCENT_INSTALL/cfg/ADAuth.php file to provide the following information:
    • a DC to connect to
    • a base DN
    • a bind dn
    • a password
  6. Add the ASCENT_INSTALL/htdocs directory to your web server. If you are using apache, you can add a line similar to the following example to create an alias: 
    Alias /ascent "/webs/ascent/htdocs"
<directory "/webs/ascent/htdocs">
	Options None
	AllowOverride None
	Order allow,deny
	Allow from all
</directory>
    NOTE: It is NOT a good idea to make anything other than the htdocs directory available via the web server, as some of the files in other directories contain sensitive information.
  7. Open up a browser to http://yourhostname.yourdomain/ascent

VERSION: 1.5
UPDATED: Mon Oct 26 04:25:17 UTC 2004