Adding your first site

Before adding your first site, make sure you got Zotonic running and are looking at the nice Powered by Zotonic web page, as described in Installing Zotonic.

Now that you got Zotonic running, it is time to create your first website with it. In this example, the site we are going to add is called yoursite.

1. Edit your /etc/hosts file, adding an entry for yoursite to point at your local host:

   127.0.0.1   yoursite
   

2. Create a user in PostgreSQL (change the password for the user!):

   CREATE USER zotonic WITH PASSWORD 'zotonic';
   

   Now, either give this user create rights to have Zotonic automatically create the database for you:

   ALTER USER zotonic CREATEDB;
   

   Alternatively, you can create the database manually:

   CREATE DATABASE zotonic WITH OWNER = zotonic ENCODING = 'UTF8';
   GRANT ALL ON DATABASE zotonic TO zotonic;
   \c zotonic
   CREATE LANGUAGE "plpgsql";
   

3. Create a new zotonic site, based on the “blog” skeleton site:

   bin/zotonic addsite -s blog yoursite
   

   Note

   Zotonic has to be running for the addsite command to succeed.

   This will add a site named yoursite. Its default URL will be http://yoursite:8000/ so either put ‘yoursite’ in your hosts file as stated above, or change the {hostname} section of the site’s config file.

   Look at Available skeleton sites to see which other skeletons are available to base your site on.

4. Edit the generated file user/sites/yoursite/config, to make sure your database credentials and the hostname are correct, and change the password for the admin.

   Note

   Your actual site location might be different, see the User sites directory.

5. Rebuild Zotonic by typing make, and then (re)start it using bin/zotonic debug.

6. Now Zotonic will install the initial database. If something goes wrong here, then it is almost always a problem with the database connection. Double-check your database configuration in the user/sites/yoursite/config file.

7. Visit http://yoursite:8000/ in your browser to see your new blog, or go directly to http://yoursite:8000/admin/ to visit the admin section.

8. Congratulations! You got your first site running.

To learn more about how sites work and what consists of a Zotonic site, please see the in-depth manual, Anatomy of a site.

Available skeleton sites

Zotonic comes with four different skeletons to base your site on.

blog

As a full example of a Zotonic website, it installs a front page with a listing of recent articles. As default example data, three example articles and a couple of images are also installed.

basesite

A skeleton site which lets you build a site on top of mod_base_site. Its site directory is pretty empty, as mod_base_site itself implements most of the frontend templates that are needed. This skeleton does install a custom homepage template as home.tpl and dispatch rule to serve it. It also adds a site.css file for tweaking fonts, colors, et cetera.

empty

An empty skeleton. No templates or dispatch rules whatsoever are created. You can use this skeleton to create a new site based on your own base templates, a custom CSS framework, etc.

nodb

Like the empty template, but this skeleton does not require a database connection. As such, the admin and content management interface is disabled, as those modules all require a database connection.