Owl Tutorial and Installation How To

This tutorial describes how to use the Owl knowledgebase system software with your NEXCESS.NET web hosting account. NEXCESS.NET specializes in hosting Owl software and this tutorial is meant to help you quickly setup your site with our web hosting service.

Owl is open source, meaning that you can use and distribute it as you'd like as long as you don't change it.

For the sake of this tutorial we'll assume that you own the domain 'johnsmith.com' and are setting up Owl at http://johnsmith.com/owl/.

Follow these steps to complete the tutorial:

1. The first thing to do is to run through the SiteWorx MySQL tutorial and create a database for Owl to use to store the information it needs.

   Create a database called 'owl' with a user named 'owl'. When you do this SiteWorx will prefix the database and user names with some text resembling your domain name.

   With our example domain of 'johnsmith.com' the database name is 'johnsmit_owl' and the username is the same 'johnsmit_owl'.
2. Download the latest version of Owl from the Owl website and unzip the contents of the zip file to your desktop using http://winzip.com. You should now have a folder on your desktop named 'intranet' with all the files and folders you need to install and run Owl. Rename the 'intranet' folder to 'owl'.
3. Open up the 'config/owl.php' file in your text editing program. We need to enter the information for the database that you created in step #1 into this file so it can be read by the script. You need to change some of the values for the paths to the 'owl' directory. For this example, you'll change the following lines with the following information:
   • $default->owl_root_url = "/owl";
   • $default->owl_fs_root = "/home/johnsmith.com/html/owl";
   • $default->owl_FileDir = "/home/johnsmith.com/html/owl";

   Your screen should look like this:

   

   Scroll down to the bottom of the file so you can change the database information. You'll change the database information as follows:

   • $default->owl_db_user = "johnsmit_owl";
   • $default->owl_db_pass = "mypassword";
   • $default->owl_db_host = "localhost"; - Stays the same.
   • $default->owl_db_name = "johnsmit_owl";

   Your screen should look like this:

   

   You can change the other values according to your preference but for this example, we'll leave the default values. Save and close the 'owl.php' file.
4. Upload the 'owl' folder to your web hosting account. You can do this using your FTP program. If you don't know how to do this, check out the FTP tutorials on our tutorials page. Once all the Owl files are uploaded, you need to change the permissions on the 'Documents' folder so the script can write to it. You can do this using the CHMOD function in your FTP program. If you don't know how to do this, check out the FTP tutorial on our tutorials page. CHMOD the 'Documents' folder to 777. You also need to import the 'DOCS/sql/mysql-tables.sql' into your database to create the tables. You can do this with the phpMyAdmin system. If you don't know how to do this, check out the phpMyAdmin tutorial on our tutorials page.
5. Once you've created the tables, you can access the login page. For this example, you'll point to 'http://www.johnsmith.com/owl/'. Enter 'admin' for both the username and password fields. Your screen should look like this:

   

   Click on the 'Login' button to login. You should now be on the main admin control panel page. Your Owl installation is now complete. Make sure you change the password for the admin account. The Owl tutorial is now complete. Your screen should look like this:

   

   For more information on how to use Owl once it's installed, check out the Owl Documentation.

Back to web hosting tutorials page