Marko Anastasov wrote this on March 15, 2010

Rendering Textpattern

Recently we needed to deploy a site made with Textpattern CMS by our friends from Sprawsm, along with a forum app that we built with Rails. The scenario is that a designer develops a web site locally in his Coda or similar environment, and hands it to you archived with a filled config.php a database that is ready to be imported on the server. We wanted to set the site up as a virtual host.

It wasn’t that quick and easy, as deploying a Textpattern site is basically a nonexistent term. Instead, it is usually just uploaded via FTP to a shared host. Searching for a sample VirtualHost configuration led me to the Textpattern Multi-Site Howto, which is quite noisy and suggests that you point your DocumentRoot to a subdirectory in sites/. It includes pieces such as [Textpattern will tell you to place your config.php file in /textpattern/. This is INCORRECT.[ and [it will present a link to the [main interface.[ This link will be INCORRECT, so do not click it[. Ignore that guide. In fact, remove the sites directory, unless you do have multiple Textpattern sites and you’re absolutely sure that you want to save a couple of kilobytes of PHP source code at the cost of getting lost in configuration.

This is what works for us:

/var/tpapp$ rm -rf sites

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName tpapp.com
    ServerAlias www.tpapp.com
    DocumentRoot /var/tpapp
    <Directory [/var/tpapp[>
        Options +FollowSymLinks
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Then in /var/tpapp/textpattern/config.php:

<?php
$txpcfg['db'] = 'tpapp_db_name';
$txpcfg['user'] = 'root';
$txpcfg['pass'] = 'rootpassword';
$txpcfg['host'] = 'localhost';
$txpcfg['table_prefix'] = '';
$txpcfg['txpath'] = '/var/tpapp/textpattern';
$txpcfg['dbcharset'] = 'utf8';
define('txpath', $txpcfg['txpath']);
?>

By the way, on Ubuntu the easiest way to get all the dependencies quickly is to install the Textpattern package, and then manually create the target database:

apt-get install textpattern

Textpattern has a screen to diagnose possible issues which you can access at /textpattern/index.php?event=diag. For example, you might’ve forgotten to enable mod_rewrite (via sudo a2enmod) on a fresh server image, or fix some simple permission errors.