Odd Wiki: 2006-06-22

(continued from 2006-06-20)

OK, when I use Firefox to download that link it’s .htm, but when I use IE it’s .txt. But I’m still getting the same thing even with .txt there. What file type should it be? Jonty

When you download the page, it should be a text file with “#!/usr/bin/perl -w” on the first line. The file extension doesn’t matter but traditionally it would be .pl. I see now that the browser suggests .htm as the file extension. Oh well. I guess it wouldn’t hurt, just as long as you know that the file contains a Perl script and not a web page. – AlexSchroeder

: Saved as a pl file and its still saying the same thing… Jonty

I’m a bit lost. So, you have a directory called “My Documents”. In that directory you have a file called wikicopy.pl. If you edit this file, you see that starts with “#!/usr/bin/perl -w” on the first line.

Then you run cmd, cd My Documents, and run (all on one line):

perl wikicopy.pl http://www.communitywiki.org/odd/MigrationTest/raw/import http://www.communitywiki.org/odd http://www.communitywiki.org/odd/MigrationTest

What do you get?

– Alex

OK, I’m not sure if that worked but it did something different. This time it came up with some instructions for wikicopy (about SOURCE and TARGET). The instructions you give above are different from the one’s on the migration page. e.g. “wikicopy” vs “wikicopy.pl” and also the http addresses are in “quotation marks” on the migration page. Jonty.

Oh, and there is a “-i” and the addresses are slightly different…did you change them on purpose? Jonty

Hm, sorry about that. To answer your questions:

wikicopy vs. wikicopy.pl – that’s just the name of the script. Whatever name you saved it under, that’s the name you should provide. Nothing else matters.
Doublequotes protect you against weird characters which are part of URLs. In the case above none of the URLs contain such weird characters (brackets, braces, questionmarks, exclamation marks, semicolons, and so on), thus doublequotes are not necessary.
The missing -i was a typo. You need it! :)

Thus:

perl wikicopy.pl -i http://www.communitywiki.org/odd/MigrationTest/raw/import http://www.communitywiki.org/odd http://www.communitywiki.org/odd/MigrationTest

– Alex

Sorry for the delay but that seems to have worked for the Migration Test so thanks a lot. Now how do I go about migrating stuff onto my own webspace? Jonty

Instead of the Migration Test wiki, use the URL of your own wiki. – Alex

I don’t have my own wiki… how do I create one on my webspace? losethegame.com for example. Jonty

Try Oddmuse:Installation. – Alex

OK, what does this bit mean “make it executable: chmod +x wiki.pl”? Jonty

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chmod

Sorry to keep bothering you but I am using windows so this doesn’t make any sense to me… Jonty

Check my instructions on Oddmuse:Windows. – Alex

For some reason oddmuse.org doesn’t seem to be working right now. I’ll try again in a bit. Jonty

OK, I’ve installed Apache 2, and when I click http://localhost/ it says “It works!”. I should already have Perl installed. If I run cmd and type “perl --version” it says that it’s installed. But when I follow the http://localhost/cgi-bin/printenv.pl link it gives me an “Internal server error” message. It says to contact mail@losethegame.com so something must have worked… any ideas? Jonty

There’s this paragraph about editing printenv.pl and changing the Perl path on the first line…

By the way, I’m a bit confused. You got yourself some webspace. So somebody is hosting webspace for you? Or is your Windows machine going to be the webserver? Reading your text again, it seems like you got yourself webspace (ie. you rented time and space on a server on the Internet), but now you are installing Oddmuse on your own local machine that is not going to be on the Internet all the time.

Doesn’t this sound fishy to you? – Alex

Yeah, I am renting webspace, I don’t use my computer as a server. I don’t really know what I am doing which is why I keep asking for help… but at least if you can get it to work for me then anyone should be able to do it! If you don’t think I know enough about it and it’s a mistake to try then say so… it’s just the first thing it said is that migration is easy, so I beleived it… If I want it to run on my webspace, not on my local machine, is that possible? Jonty

To run it in your own webspace, you need to start with the following information:

A copy of the current script from http://www.emacswiki.org/scripts/current.
You need to know how to transfer files from your computer to your webspace.
You need to know where to put CGI scripts in your webspace. Often this is a directory called “cgi-bin”.

Once you know all of this, copy the “current” file from your computer to the appropriate place in your webspace.

Next, try to view the “current” file in your webspace. If you get the content of the script, then it is not being executed. You probably need to make it executable. How to do this depends on the administration of your webspace. Perhaps there is some kind of file manager that does this for you. Or you can log into your account using ssh, in which case you will need some Unix knowhow. It would basically involve something like the Oddmuse:Manual Setup.

Your goal is to see an empty homepage.

Once you’re there, we can start adding things.

– Alex

Cheers, thanks for all your help. I’m having a look for the cgi directory now. Jonty

“Unfortunately CGI is not supported on our Windows shared hosting plans. For CGI support, you would need to change your hosting operating system and upgrade to a Deluxe Linux plan with CGI support.” I’m guessing this means I need to use Linux? Jonty

MattisManzel: Maybe. Ubuntu is cool.

How much are you paying, Jonty? You might want to check out Oddmuse:Free Hosting. Even Geocities offers something for $10/month. “Upgrading” to something “Deluxe” sure sounds more expensive than the $2 to $10 per month I’d expect you to pay. I’m sure they could set up Perl CGI scripts on Windows, too, since I’ve been doing that at our company. But if your current hosting plan doesn’t include that, then what can I say? It’s their service they are selling. They get to choose what to offer. You get to choose whether you want to pay. – AlexSchroeder

I’m paying $4 per month… I think the deluxe one is $7 per month. I don’t understand what it means by Linux hosting though, is that just what operating system you need to use to upload files? As I’m sure you have already worked out, I don’t really know very much about any of this… I tend to experiment a lot with things I don’t really understand… Jonty

Linux hosting probably means that they are using Linux to host your site. It has nothing to do with the system on your own personal computer. It’s all about the system they are using on their computer!

If you’re uploading your files to your webspace via FTP or SCP, Linux vs Windows hosting makes no difference. If you connect to your webspace via Telnet or SSH, you will note a difference: Instead of a Windows command interpreter (cmd), you’ll get a Unix shell (bash or similar). Linux hosting also means that you’ll have the Unix command-line tools at your disposal such as chmod and chown. The kind of stuff that we’re using. I prefer Linux hosting to Windows hosting.

If you know very little about these kinds of systems, then I assume that Windows vs. Linux hosting will make no difference to you, since you won’t be connecting to your webspace via Telnet or SSH anyway. I guess you’ll be using FTP or SCP to copy files, and that’s it.

All you care about is 1. you need to run a CGI script, and 2. where do you put it. – Alex

OK, yeah I am only using FTP. I will look into Linux hosting then, I’m pretty busy at the moment though so might not get it sorted for a while. Thanks for all the help. Jonty