Installing Scripts - Don't be Scared!
By Sean Burns
2003-10-14
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Read The Instructions
READ THE INSTRUCTIONS. I'm one of those people who never reads the instructions when I buy something new - I think I know what I'm doing, mess around, get annoyed and then finally decide to find out what I should really be doing. With scripts, just read the instructions first - everything will be much easier this way.
All that is really required is to ftp the scripts to your cgi-bin - I set up an individual folder in my cgi bin for each script. Some instructions doin't really explain this but it's much easier to do this for maintainance reasons and to avoid conflicts between scripts with the same file names. If you have a website, you should already know how to ftp stuff. If you don't, download an ftp program such as WS_FTP (http://www.wsftp.com/) or CuteFTP (http://www.cuteftp.com/) - they are simple to use.
Once you've uploaded the files to correct places, the major thing that you will need to do is deal with file permissions. What this refers to is setting what can be done to each file - read, write and execute. There is a bit more to it but at this point, you don't really need to know what it's for, you just need to know how to do it. Again, your instructions should explain this but a general rule to follow is that any folders that you need to set up for the script will need to have permissions set at 777 (rwxrwxrwx), .cgi files are generally 755 (rwxr-xr-x) and things like database and html files tend to be 666 (rw-rw-rw-). This is just a guide - please make sure that these permissions are correct for your script.
If you found this article interesting, you may want to read these as well:
» How To Install A CGI Script
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