The setup in this guide is demonstrated in below video as well if you want to watch and follow the guide at the same time!
This guide relies heavily on Vagrant and assumes some previous knowledge of how to use and/or troubleshoot vagrant.
Please make sure you install everything in this list before you proceed with the platform setup.
PHP >=7.0 <7.2 - if you are using Platform V4.0.0
PHP >=7.1 <7.4 - if you are using Platform V4.1.0 or later
PHP >=7.2 <7.4 - if you are using Platform V4.4.0 or later
Clone the repository (this will create a directory named platform)
Go into the platform directory
Switch to the develop branch
Once you have the code, the next step is to prepare a web server. For this part, we will use vagrant, with the Vagrant and Homestead.yml files that ship with Ushahidi.
First up we need to install the PHP dependencies. In the platform directory, run:
If you get a warning like "In MemcachedConnector.php line 69: Class 'Memcached' not found" at this point you can safely ignore it, we will come back to it later.
Bring up the vagrant server. Since this is the first time you run it, it will also provision the machine from scratch:
Our vagrant box is built on top of Laravel's Homestead, a pre-packaged Vagrant box that provides a pre-built development environment. Homestead includes the Nginx web server, PHP 7.1, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Memcached, Node, and all of the other goodies you might need.
Now that you (hopefully) have a working vagrant machine, you will have to ssh into it to finish installing the dependencies.
Change to the project directory. This is shared by Vagrant / VirtualBox between your virtual server and your machine for easy updating during development:
Set required php version. For current version of Ushahidi this should be 7.3:
Important: If you didn't setup vagrant-hostupdater, or if it failed for any reason, you will need to add the following lines to /etc/hosts in your host machine.
At this point you should have a running web server, but your deployment isn't set up yet. We still need to configure the database and run the migrations.
Copy the configuration file .env.example to make sure the platform can connect to the database.
Run the migrations. This is required to be able to use your deployment, since it includes basic data such as an initial "admin" user, roles, the database schema itself, etc.
Example JSON
If you want to learn more about vagrant, please refer to their docs here
Recommended: - this is useful to avoid having to update /etc/hosts by hand (Note: The plugin homepage says that this plugin is not maintained anymore. For now, it still seems to work fine, so you can ignore this warning.)
- Note: Windows users may be required to Enable VT-X (Intel Virtualization Technology) in the computer's bios settings, disable Hyper-V on program and features page in the control panel, and install the VirtualBox Extension Pack (installation instructions here.)
VirtualBox > 6.1.28 . As described here , you may need to add the virtual internal network to a configuration file in VirtualBox. Our Vagrant/Homestead setup is coded to use the 192.168.33.0/24 network.
Please create the file /etc/vbox/networks.conf (or equivalent in Windows (?)) and make sure it has the following line in it:
* 192.168.33.0/24\
If you haven't used git before or need help with git specific issues, make sure to check out their docs here
vagrant ssh (to ssh into the machine. If you get an error like 'the path to your private key does not exist' when doing vagrant ssh, you need to generate a key, or if you already have one, double-check the path in the file "Homestead.yaml" . One good guide on generating keys is found here: )
Go to in your browser to check the API is up and running. You should see some JSON with an API version, endpoints and user info.
Congratulations! You have set up the API. You may want now to for a full experience.
According to information found here , a change in VirtualBox's handling of networking can render Homestead installations invalid.
