This section outlines the requirements for installing the Ushahidi platform on your computer.

The "AMP" (Apache, Mysql, PHP) Stack

Before installing Ushahidi, following must be installed in the target system:

• PHP version 5.2.3 or greater
  • PHP 5.4 support is added in Ushahidi 2.6
  • Prior to Ushahidi 2.6, you must version between PHP 5.2.3 - 5.3.x
• MySQL version 5.0 or greater
• An HTTP Server. Kohana, which Ushahidi is built on, is known to work with the following web servers:
  • Apache 1.3+
  • Apache2.0+
  • lighttpd
  • Microsoft Internet Information Server (MS IIS)
  • Nginx
• Unicode support in the operating system

Required PHP Extensions

The following is a list of PHP extensions that must be installed on your server in order for Ushahidi to run properly:

• PCRE (http://php.net/pcre) must be compiled with --enable-utf8 and --enable-unicode-properties for UTF-8 functions to work properly.
• iconv (http://php.net/iconv) is required for UTF-8 transliteration.
• mcrypt (http://php.net/mcrypt) is required for encryption.
• SPL (http://php.net/spl) is required for several core libraries
• mbstring (http://php.net/mbstring) which speeds up Kohana's UTF-8 functions.
• cURL (http://php.net/curl) which is used to access remote sites.
• MySQL (http://php.net/mysql) is required for database access.
• GD (http://php.net/gd) is required for image manipulation.
• IMAP (http://php.net/imap) is required for handling e-mails.

TIP: Need to figure out what extensions you already have installed on your server? Here are instructions to do just that http://jontangerine.com/silo/php/phpinfo/

Optional Server Requirements

To use Ushahidi's "Clean URLs" feature – meaning that your deployment's URLs will not include "index.php" – on an Apache Web Server, you will need the mod_rewrite module and the ability to use local .htaccess files. To check if local .htaccess files are allowed, verify that the "AllowOverride" directive in your Apache config (for the web server directory in which you have installed Ushahidi) has been set to "All".

<Directory [your-document-root-directory]>
    ...
    AllowOverride All
    ...
</Directory>