Installation requirements

Zotonic runs on Linux, Mac OS X and (not officially) on Windows.

Before running Zotonic, you must make sure your system meets the minimum requirements to do so. Zotonic needs the following software installed:

1. Erlang/OTP version R15B03 or newer, unless it is one of the Buggy Erlang releases. Build it from source, or use packages.
2. ImageMagick (version 6.5 or higher) for the convert and identify tools. Make sure that the convert and identify tools are in your path so that zotonic can find them. For auto-rotation to work you’ll need the exif utility as well.
3. PostgreSQL version 8.4 or higher. Enable trust-authentication (username+password) in Postgres (see below).
4. make A recent version of the GNU make utility.
5. git Zotonic comes with a few subprojects which are pulled from the web with the git command.

If you meet these requirements, head straight on to Installing Zotonic, otherwise, read on below for the specifics on these.

Erlang

You can check if you have Erlang installed by typing the following command in a terminal:

$ erl

The output should be something like:

Erlang/OTP 17 [erts-6.0] [source] [64-bit] [smp:4:4] [async-threads:10] [hipe] [kernel-poll:false]
Eshell V5.9.2  (abort with ^G)
1>

(Press ctrl+c twice to exit)

If your version is below release R15B03, you need to upgrade. If you don’t have Erlang installed, we recommend downloading a build for your operating system from the Erlang Solutions website:

https://www.erlang-solutions.com/downloads/download-erlang-otp

Buggy Erlang releases

The following releases contain known issues and are therefore not supported:

• Release 17.3 has an SSL issue and causes Zotonic’s script to fail. Use another release, for instance OTP 17.0.
• Release R16B03 has an issue with the sendfile driver. But, luckily, Zotonic’s sendfile support is disabled by default (when you can, instead, use R16B03-1).

ImageMagick

You can check if you have ImageMagick installed by typing the following command in a terminal:

$ convert -version

This tells you which version of ImageMagick is installed:

Version: ImageMagick 6.7.7-10 2012-08-17 Q16 http://www.imagemagick.org

PostgreSQL

You can check if you have PostgreSQL installed by typing the following command in a terminal:

$ psql -V

Returns the PostgreSQL version:

psql (PostgreSQL) 9.1.6

Enabling trust-authentication in PostgreSQL

To let Postgres users access the database from Zotonic, you need to make a configuration change in Postgres’ configuration file pg_hba.conf.

On Linux, this file is located in /etc/postgresql/<pg version>/main/pg_hba.conf. Add the following lines:

# Zotonic settings
local   all         zotonic                           ident
host    all         zotonic     127.0.0.1/32          md5
host    all         zotonic     ::1/128               md5

These settings assume that your Zotonic sites are going to connect with a Postgres user called zotonic. For other user names, adjust accordingly. Do not forget to restart Postgres after you’ve made this change.

Platform-specific notes

Ubuntu / Debian

We recommend you install Erlang from the Erlang solutions website:

https://www.erlang-solutions.com/downloads/download-erlang-otp

The other requirements are easily fetched with apt:

sudo apt-get install build-essential postgresql imagemagick git

FreeBSD

If you’re running on FreeBSD, make sure you’ve got the ‘GNU’ ‘make’ (check with make --version, which should give you GNU, and version info). If you don’t have GNU make, Zotonic will give an error when trying to compile.

Mac OS X

With Homebrew you can install Erlang and ImageMagick using the following commands:

brew install erlang
brew install imagemagick

Alternatively, with MacPorts:

sudo port install erlang +ssl
sudo port install ImageMagick

For PostgreSQL choose either:

• EnterpriseDB
• Postgress.app

Windows

Currently, Zotonic is not officially supported on the Windows platform. However, the main dependencies Erlang, PostgreSQL and ImageMagick do work on Windows, so, if you’re adventurous, it should be possible to get it running.

We have included user-contributed start.cmd and build.cmd batch-scripts which used to work on Windows, but have not been kept up-to-date with recent changes. Expect some major tweaking to get this back on track.