This tutorial will walk you through installing Elefant on Zend's new PHPCloud.com cloud hosting service.
Note that PHPCloud.com is still a technology preview, so things may change and cause this to need updating. If you see anything that needs updating here, please post a message to the Elefant forum.
Here are a few prerequisites you'll need before you can start deploying Elefant to PHPCloud.com:
My Account > Access KeysNow you're ready to get started.
In the PHPCloud.com admin area, click on My Containers then Create Container. Enter a name and choose a password for your container, then click Create Container. The website will then take a few moments to create a new site container for you at the URL http://mycontainername.my.phpcloud.com/.
In the container, you'll see a Default Application under the list of Deployed Applications. It should have a git access button that lets you copy a link to your new site's Git repository. You'll need this link in the next step.
Create a folder and initialize a new Git repository in it as follows:
$ mkdir myelefanttest
$ cd myelefanttest
$ git init
$ git remote add phpcloud https://myelefanttest@myelefanttest.my.phpcloud.com/git/container-root.git
$ git pull phpcloud master
Note that the URL of the remote repository is the one from step 2. Adjust your command as necessary.
It will prompt you to enter your password, then download a public folder into your new repository with a single default-container-index.html file in it.
Next, download the latest copy of Elefant from http://github.com/jbroadway/elefant/downloads and unzip it to your myelefanttest folder. You should now have a public and an elefant-0.9.14-rc folder inside your repository.
Now on the command line again, enter the following:
$ cp -R elefant-0.9.14-rc/* public/
$ git rm public/default-container-index.html
$ git add public/*
$ git commit -m ""Initial import of Elefant codebase"" public
Now we are ready to configure our database and site settings so we can deploy our new website.
Under Management > Database Management, you'll see a link to Manage your database using phpMyAdmin. Click the link to open phpMyAdmin, then select your database from the left column.
Now go to the Import tab and import the MySQL database schema from Elefant's conf/install_mysql.sql file. phpMyAdmin's default import settings should work fine.
First, we need to generate an encrypted password for our admin user. We can do this with the following command in Elefant:
$ cd public
$ ./conf/elefant encrypt-password ""your password""
$ cd ..
Copy the output for the next step.
Click on the user table in the left column then the Insert tab. Enter the following into the form:
id -> Value = leave blank
email -> Value = your email address
password -> Value = the encrypted password
expires -> Function = CURDATE
name -> Value = your name
type -> Value = ""admin""
signed_up -> Function = CURDATE
updated -> Function = CURDATE
userdata -> Value = ""[]""
Click 'Go' to create your admin user.
Now it's time to connect the pieces. Instead of adding our database connection info to public/conf/config.php like an ordinary site, we're going to add a few lines to public/index.php to retrieve them using get_cfg_var(). At line 50 of the file, add the following code:
$conf['Database']['driver'] = 'mysql';
$conf['Database']['host'] = get_cfg_var ('zend_developer_cloud.db.host');
$conf['Database']['name'] = get_cfg_var ('zend_developer_cloud.db.name');
$conf['Database']['user'] = get_cfg_var ('zend_developer_cloud.db.username');
$conf['Database']['pass'] = get_cfg_var ('zend_developer_cloud.db.password');
This is the recommended way of accessing your database connection settings on PHPCloud.
Note for Elefant 1.1+ users, the
$conf['Database']['driver']references all becomes$conf['Database']['master']['driver'].
In step 3, I didn't mention but we didn't copy the default Elefant .htaccess file into our public folder. Instead, we're going to use the one provided by Zend in the PHPCloud documentation. Create a public/.htaccess file with the following contents:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -s [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -l [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^.*$ index.php [NC,L]
php_flag zend_codetracing.trace_enable on
php_flag zend_codetracing.always_dump on
One last step for good measures is to tell Elefant that the installer has been run (even if technically it hasn't). To do this, simply create a blank file named installed in the public/install folder:
$ touch public/install/installed
Lets commit the changes we've made so we can deploy our site:
$ git add public/.htaccess public/install/installed
$ git commit -m ""Added phpcloud configurations"" public
In order to deploy through Git, I had to edit my .git/config file and add the following to increase its buffer size:
[http]
postBuffer = 524288000
After that change, deploying our site is now just a single command from inside our repository:
$ git push phpcloud master
Enter your password and when Git has finished updating the remote repository, you should see your new site running at http://myelefanttest.my.phpcloud.com/
To make changes to your site such as customizing your layout and CSS, simply commit them using Git then run the above command to deploy them to your live site.
You can now log in at http://myelefanttest.my.phpcloud.com/admin with your email and password from step 4 to begin editing your site.