Coppermine Photo Gallery v1.5.x: Documentation and Manual

Table of Contents

Installation and Setup

How to install the script

What the installer does

After performing some basic checks, the installer creates the needed database tables for you and fills them with default values. It creates the file include/config.inc.php within the coppermine folder on your server that stores the database details you entered during install. If you should change your mysql database details later (i.e. if you change the password of your mysql user account or if you migrate your gallery to another server), you will need to edit include/config.inc.php manually to reflect the changes. The file include/config.inc.php also keeps the install script from being run twice: if the installer is run, a check is performed wether the config file exists - if yes, the installer will stop and redirect the user to the index page.

Related information

There are some additional pieces of information that are related to installing:

Server configuration

When installing Coppermine, you might run into issues not directly related to Coppermine, but to webserver setup. Therefore, this section of the docs can only give a rough overview about the webserver setup issue. We can only give recommendations, but it's beyond the scope of the coppermine support board to actually advise how to configure a webserver in the first place. This being said: if you have issues related to webserver setup, ask your webhost for support instead of asking your question on the coppermine support board.

register_globals

In older versions of PHP, the default setting for register_globals used to be "on", which resulted in many PHP coders coming up with sloppy code in terms of security (simply because they were not aware of the dangers that lay in such sloppy coding). As a result, there used to be many scripts that relied on the server variable "register_globals" to be turned on. However, as many malevolent attacks against scripts are being carried out that rely on register_globals to be turned on, it's advisable to turn that feature off in the config of your webserver's PHP settings. In recent versions of PHP, the default setting is "off". However, your webhost may still have enabled register_globals to allow you to run outdated scripts that rely on register_globals.

To make this absolutely clear: coppermine does not need register_globals=on, but it will run both with register_gloabls turned on or off. It's just the security impact of this variable turned on that we want to alert end users about. If your webserver has register_globals turned on, the installer will warn you about this fact, but it will continue anyway.

The Coppermine dev team strongly recommends to turn register_globals off on your server. However, we can not tell you how to accomplish that: it's a webserver-setting, not a Coppermine setting. Usually (when you're on shared hosting) you can ask your webhost to turn register_globals off for you on your server. A good webhost should do that for you or tell you how to accomplish this (if they allow you to configure your server). Please do not ask question on register_globals on the Coppermine support board - that's beyond the scope of that support forum.

There will be no negative impact for your Coppermine install if you leave register_globals turned on: nobody but you (the admin) will notice the mesages of the script that warn about the dangers that lie in register_globals. There might however be an impact for other applications on your webspace - we can't tell for sure.