Nova 1 Getting Started Install Guide
Installing Nova on your server is a relatively painless process that should only take a few minutes if you have all the pieces you need at the start. In order to install Nova on your server, you'll need the following information:
To begin with the install, you must upload the Nova files up to your server.
Before you can begin the installation, there are a couple steps you need to do.
The first thing you'll need to do before installing Nova is to set up your database connection parameters. If the connection isn't setup properly, you won't be able to connect to the database to create the tables needed and insert the necessary data. To set your database connection parameters, open application/config/database.php
. Several variables on the page need to be filled out in order to continue.
Simply fill in the variables with your own values, making sure that you don't remove any of the quotation marks in the process.
$db['default']['hostname'] = "localhost";
$db['default']['username'] = "username";
$db['default']['password'] = "password";
$db['default']['database'] = "database_name";
$db['default']['dbdriver'] = "mysql";
$db['default']['dbprefix'] = "nova_";
For users who have hosts with other options, CodeIgniter allows setting whether or not to cache queries, where to cache them to, whether to use a persistent connection and allowing changes to the charcter set and collation of the database. Changing these settings is only recommended for advanced users or if absolutely necessary.
Nova allows users to upload their own images to the server and use them in their bios. In order to allow this feature, you have to configure the FTP library. In order to do that, you'll need to edit application/config/ftp.php
.
By default, Nova ships with DS9 as the default genre, but you can change that to a wide variety of options. In order to change this information, open application/config/nova.php
.
Simply change the genre code to the genre you want. A complete list of available genres can be seen directly above this line of code. Putting in a value that is not in this list and does not have an install file and assets directory will cause the system to break!
$config['genre'] = "DS9";
The Nova config file also gives you other options to change. Besides changing your genre, you can also change the meta data associated with the site and RSS feed information.
Once you have updated the database connection config file and set your genre, you can begin to install the system by opening a browser and navigating to your site. Nova will immediately check to see if the system is installed and if it isn't, redirect you to the installation page. From there, you can choose to do a fresh installation of Nova. Follow the process through to install Nova into your database to use for your RPG. The steps of the install process are as follows:
On PHP 5 systems, Nova will attempt to change several permissions in order to ensure all the upload features and backup features work properly. If you are running a server that uses PHP 4 or your server doesn't support allowing scripts to change permissions, you will have to make those changes manually. If you don't know how to change file permissions on your server, contact your host.
You will need to make sure that several directories are writable (777) in order for all the upload features to work:
application/assets/images
application/assets/backups
core/logs
Log in with your AnodyneID to rate this article or submit the article for review.