PHPDig Tutorial and Installation How To

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

PHPDig is open source, meaning that you can use, distribute and change it as long as you don't remove the original authors copyright information.

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

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 PHPDig to use to store the information it needs.

   Create a database called 'phpdig' with a user named 'phpdig'. 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_phpdig' and the username is the same 'johnsmit_phpdig'.
2. Download the latest version of PHPDig from the PHPDig website and unzip the contents of the zip file to your desktop using http://winzip.com. You should now have all the files and folders you need to install and run PHPDig. Create a folder called 'phpdig' on your desktop and move all the files and folders from the zip file into it.
3. Open the 'phpdig' folder and then the 'includes' folder. Open 'config.php' with your text editing program. You need to change the username and password for the admin account to your preference. In this example, we'll change these lines as follows:
   • define('PHPDIG_ADM_USER','admin'); // username
   • define('PHPDIG_ADM_PASS','mypassword'); // password

   Your screen should look like this:

   

   You can configure the other settings according to your preferences but it's not necessary at this time. Save and close the 'config.php' file.
4. Upload the 'phpdig' folder to your web hosting account. You should do this using an FTP Program. If you need help with FTPing files, you can check out the FTP tutorials on our tutorials page.
5. Now you need to change the permissions on some of the folders so that the script can have access to them. You can do this using the CHMOD function of your FTP program. If you don't know how to do this, check out the FTP tutorials on our tutorials page. You need to CHMOD the folders as follows:
   • CHMOD the 'text_content' folder to 777
   • CHMOD the 'includes' folder to 777
   • CHMOD the 'admin/temp' folder to 777
6. Now we can access the PHPDig installer. In this example, we'll point to 'http://www.johnsmith.com/phpdig/admin/install.php'. You should get a popup asking you to enter the login and password. Your screen should look like this:

   

   Enter the information you used to created your username and password in step #3 and click 'Ok' to login. You are now on the database setup page. Enter the information from the database you created in step #1. For this example, we'll enter the following values in the fields:

   • Hostname: localhost - Stays the same.
   • Skip the 'Port' field
   • Skip the 'Sock' field
   • User: johnsmit_phpdig
   • Password: mypassword
   • PhpDig Database: johnsmit_phpdig
   • Skip the 'Tables prefix' field

   Make sure you check the 'Create tables only' radio button because we already created the database in step #1. Your screen should look like this:

   

   Click the 'Install phpdig database' button to continue. If you receive any errors, go back and make sure you've entered the correct information in the database fields and make sure that you've given the folders the correct permissions. Your screen should look like this:

   

   Your installation is finished. You can use the admin control page to manage your PHPDig as you see fit. The PHPDig tutorial is now complete.

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

Back to web hosting tutorials page