Foswiki 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 which it uses a number of shell commands and RCS (Revision Control System), a GNU Free Software package. It should be able to run on any server platform that meets the following requirements.

Resource	Required Server Environment
Perl	5.8.8 or higher
RCS	5.7 or higher (including GNU diff) Optional. Foswiki includes a pure Perl implementation of RCS (RcsLite? ) that can be used instead, at the cost of performance
GNU diff	GNU diff 2.7 or higher is required when not using the all-Perl RcsLite? . Install within the PATH if not included with RCS (check version with diff -v) Must be the version used by RCS, to avoid problems with binary attachments - RCS may have hard-coded path to diff
Other external programs	fgrep, egrep
Cron/scheduler	• Unix: cron • Windows: cron equivalents
Web server	Apache is well supported; for information on other servers, see Foswiki:Support.InstallingOnSpecificPlatforms.

Perl Modules

A complete list of the required and optional Perl modules can be found in lib/DEPENDENCIES.

Most of them will probably already be available in your installation. You can check version numbers with the configure script, or if you're still trying to get to that point, check from the command line like this:

perl -e 'use FileHandle; print $FileHandle::VERSION."\n"'

Client Requirements

The standard installation? has relatively low browser requirements:

• XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant
• Cookies, if persistent sessions are required
• Javascript, for edit/save/upload functionality

  Change {ValidationMethod}{Method} from strikeone to embedded in configure to allow non-javascript browsers to edit/save/upload

CSS and Javascript are used in most skins. Some skins will require more recent releases of browsers. The default 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.

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Related Topics: AdminDocumentationCategory?