Installation

Sticky Notes comes with an automatic installation utility. The installation process is interactive and very simple. This guide provides a step-by-step walkthrough of the entire installation process. Please create a ticket if you need any assistance with the installation process.

Download Sticky Notes

Download the latest stable version of Sticky Notes from here. After downloading, extract the ZIP archive to your favorite location.

Set up a web server

Sticky Notes is a PHP application, so you will need a web server running, if you don't have one already. Follow the links below for setting up your web server and a database engine:

Installing apache: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/install.html
Installing MySQL: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/installing.html
Installing PHP (5.4+): http://php.net/manual/en/install.php

Additionally, you'll need to install the following PHP extensions:

php_mcrypt: Required by Laravel, which is the underlying PHP framework
php_gd: Required if you use the captcha module
php_mysql: Required if you use the MySQL database driver

Once you have apache up and running, you will have a web root folder, which is usually located at /var/www on Linux systems and C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache<version>\htdocs on Windows machines. Copy the contents of the public folder to your web root. If you are running multiple websites on the server, you may create any sub-folders inside your web root accordingly. You can copy all other files in the Sticky Notes archive to any location on your server, including the web root itself.

Important: No matter where your public folder and the rest of the files reside, please make sure the paths to all the folders are correctly set inside public/index.php and bootstrap/paths.php.

Folder permissions on Linux machines

You'll need to change the permissions on the app/storage folder, and all of its subfolders to make them writable by apache. On linux systems, apache usually runs as the user www-data - so you'll need to make the folder writable by the user under which apache is running on your system. When in doubt, you can always set the storage folder's (and its subfolder's) permissions to 777, however it is recommended to limit the write access to apache's user only.

Database configuration

The installer does not create the database on the DB server for security reasons, it only creates and modifies tables. Once you have created the database manually, go to the app/config folder and rename database.sample.php to database.php. Now open the database.php file and fill in your database server details. There are three main things to do here:

Set the appropriate database driver as the default connection. Currently, sqlite, mysql, pgsql and sqlsrv are supported.
Fill in all the details against the database server you are going to use in the connections section.
If you are using the sqlite driver, please make sure that not only your database file (typically located under app/database) but the database folder itself if writable by apache.

Where's the log file?

The log file can be found inside app/storage/logs

If you encounter any errors during the installation process, please share the contents of the log file by creating a new issue at the Sticky Notes issue tracker on GitHub.

Installing the system

If everything goes well, opening http://yoursite.com should take you to the Sticky Notes installer screen:

Once you click on the Test connection button, Sticky Notes will check your database connectivity. If successful, you will see a Start installation button. If the database connection fails, Sticky Notes will tell you what went wrong.

Clicking on the Start installation button will begin the installation process:

Finish up!

Once installation is complete, the installer will give you a set of admin credentials. Please make a note of those credentials. You can change them at any point of time later by logging into the admin panel.

That's it! Your new Sticky Notes instance is ready to use.

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