System Requirements

Low client and server base requirements are core features that keep Foswiki widely deployable, particularly across a range of browser platforms and versions. Many extensions exist which enhance and expand Foswiki's capabilities; they may have additional requirements.

Server Requirements

Foswiki is written in Perl 5, which is supported on Microsoft Windows as well as Unix and Unix-like systems (including Linux and OSX). On Unix-like systems, it uses a number of shell commands. It should be able to run out-of-the-box on any server platform that meets the following requirements.

Resource Required Server Environment
Perl 5.8.8 or higher. A minimum of perl 5.12 is recommended.
External programs GNU diff 2.7 or higher, fgrep, and egrep (not required on Windows)
Web server Apache, Nginx and Lighttpd are all well supported; Apache sample configs are provided. For information on other servers, see Foswiki:Support.InstallingOnSpecificPlatforms.

Foswiki is designed to automatically detect the platform and generate a basic configuration the first time the configure script is run, but start from your expected default "view" URL, so that Foswiki can figure out your URL scheme.

Prior versions of Foswiki shipped with the important CPAN modules. Foswiki 2.0 does not, and you must ensure that the perl dependencies listed below are installed before attempting to use Foswiki. For a detailed report, System.PerlDependencyReport (admin access only!) or the shell script tools/dependencies.

If you are unable to install CPAN modules, see Foswiki:Extensions.CpanContrib. Install this extension into your Foswiki installation directory if you cannot install Perl modules otherwise.

You can check the dependencies before Foswiki is fully operational with the following command. It will list all potentially missing dependencies. Not all listed dependences are required on all installations, Refer to the usage message that accompanies each missing dependency in the report.

cd /path/to/foswiki
perl tools/dependencies

Specific distribution details

Find the closest match to your installed system. and click on the "Show ..." link to reveal the details.

Ubuntu and other Debian derived distributions

RedHat, SuSE, CentOS and other RPM based distributions

Gentoo (ebuild) based distributions

FreeBSD (pkg) based distributions

Installation with CPAN

Client Requirements

The standard installation has relatively low browser requirements:

  • XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant
  • Cookies, if persistent sessions are required
  • Javascript, is required for configure, edit save and upload functionality. Foswiki is viewable without javascript.

CSS and Javascript are used in most skins. Some skins will require more recent releases of browsers. The default (Pattern) skin is tested on IE 6+, Safari, Chrome and Firefox.

You can easily select a balance of browser capability versus look and feel. Try the installed skins at SkinBrowser and more at Foswiki:Extensions.SkinPackage.


Related Topics: AdminDocumentationCategory
Topic revision: r1 - 17 Jun 2022, ProjectContributor
This site is powered by FoswikiCopyright © by the contributing authors. All material on this site is the property of the contributing authors.
Ideas, requests, problems regarding Foswiki? Send feedback