Installation prerequisites

Before running Zotonic, you must make sure your system meets the minimum requirements to do so. Zotonic needs the following software installed:

1. Erlang R14B03 or newer. Build it from source, or use packages.
2. ImageMagick (version 6.5 or higher) for the convert and identify tools. Make sure that the convert and identify tools are in your path so that zotonic can find them. For auto-rotation to work you’ll need the exif utility as well.
3. PostgreSQL version 8.4 or higher. Enable trust-authentication (username+password) in Postgres (see below).
4. make A recent version of the GNU make utility.
5. git if you are planning to use the latest-and-greatest development version of Zotonic.

If you meet these requirements, head straight on to Installation, otherwise, read on below for the specifics on these.

Erlang

You can check if you have Erlang installed by typing the following command in a terminal:

$ erl

The output should be something like:

Erlang R15B02 (erts-5.9.2) [source] [64-bit] [smp:4:4] [async-threads:0] [hipe] [kernel-poll:false]
Eshell V5.9.2  (abort with ^G)
1>

(Press ctrl+c twice to exit)

If your version is below release R14B03, you need to upgrade.

ImageMagick

You can check if you have ImageMagick installed by typing the following command in a terminal:

$ convert -version

This tells you which version of ImageMagick is installed:

Version: ImageMagick 6.7.7-10 2012-08-17 Q16 http://www.imagemagick.org

PostgreSQL

You can check if you have PostgreSQL installed by typing the following command in a terminal:

$ psql -V

Returns the PostgreSQL version:

psql (PostgreSQL) 9.1.6

Enabling trust-authentication in PostgreSQL

To let Postgres users access the database from Zotonic, you need to make a configuration change in Postgres’ configuration file pg_hba.conf.

On Linux, this file is located in /etc/postgresql/<pg version>/main/pg_hba.conf. Add the following lines:

# Zotonic settings
local   all         zotonic                           ident
host    all         zotonic     127.0.0.1/32          md5
host    all         zotonic     ::1/128               md5

These settings assume that your Zotonic sites are going to connect with a Postgres user called zotonic. For other user names, adjust accordingly. Do not forget to restart Postgres after you’ve made this change.

Platform-specific notes

Ubuntu ( >= 10.04)

A recent Erlang should be installed from a custom PPA by running:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:scattino/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install erlang-base erlang-ssl postgresql imagemagick

Debian (lenny)

You’ll need to build erlang from source. Before building, make sure you install these packages:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libncurses5-dev m4
sudo apt-get install openssl libssl-dev
sudo apt-get install unixodbc-dev

Alternatively, you can install a precompiled recent Erlang from the following PPA: https://launchpad.net/~scattino/+archive/ppa

FreeBSD

If you’re running on FreeBSD, make sure you’ve got the ‘GNU’ ‘make’ (check with ‘make –version’, which should give you GNU, and version info) If you’re not running GNU-make as a default, edit the Makefile to run with ‘gmake’ (make sure gmake is available first).

Mac OS X

With MacPorts you can install Erlang and ImageMagick using the following commands:

sudo port install erlang +ssl
sudo port install ImageMagick

EnterpriseDB has an excellent PostgreSQL installer available at http://www.enterprisedb.com/products/pgdownload.do#osx

Windows

Currently, Zotonic is not officially supported on the Windows platform. However, the main dependencies Erlang, PostgreSQL and ImageMagick do work on Windows, so, if you’re adventurous, it should be possible to get it running.

We have included user-contributed start.cmd and build.cmd batch-scripts which are supposed to work on Windows.