Installing SUMA on a Hosting Website w/ layman's knowledge

[Brian FagginBatista]

Hi all,

The library I work at uses Reclaim Hosting as their hosting website, and I'm very puzzled on how to go through installing SUMA onto it. 

AFAIK, our IT services doesn't support Linux, so it would have to be done through this hosting service, and yet I'm unsure of how we would install the files into Hosting's system.

I tried skimming through the posts on this group but I'm still confused on how I would install SUMA onto the platform itself.

If anyone else has had success running SUMA through a hosting service, please let me know.

Best,

Brian.

[Mark Swenson]

Brian,

It looks like you might be able to install SUMA there, but depending on your experience level and exactly how this service works, there might be a few tricks involved or some obstacles.

As a hosting service it offers PHP, MySQL, and SSH access, which are key features you require.  The primary obstacles are going to be what rights you have in the hosting environment and if all of the required software are installed at the required versions (the cURL, mbstring PDO and DOM modules for PHP, PHP at 7.1+, and the Zend Framework at 1.12.20).  On a server you run yourself, or a virtual server that you can get from a service (like Linode or Digital Ocean) you would have root privileges allowing you to install arbitrary software.  I don't know what the process for getting software that's not installed added or if the software you need is already there.

If it's already there, then you'd need to use the SSH access to get the SUMA files onto the server into the right place and set privileges on them appropriately.  You can upload files to a server using SSH via a protocol called SCP and there's a free piece of software for Windows called WinSCP that makes that fairly easy.  To do all of the command line stuff required you'd use a regular SSH client, like PuTTy.  

You'd probably also need to use that to get the MySQL database setup properly, although that might be able to be handled via the console they offer there.  Some of the instructions are likely to vary depending on the configuration of your environment on the server.  The more you know about Linux, the easier it will be to figure out what you need to do to resolve those problems.  However, it sounds like you probably have limited Linux experience, so that might be tricky.

Mark Swenson

IT Manager

Winnetka-Northfield Public Library District

[Brian FagginBatista]

Indeed, my Linux experience is a very large zero. I think I've seen a Linux "desktop" screen once in my life and that's pretty much it.

I'll try to dig through Reclaim Hosting's documentation and see what of (if any) the required software is already installed and what would need to be added.

I appreciate the help and knowledge, nonetheless.