Installing Bolt

This page explains the various ways of installing Bolt. You can either use the command-line or your FTP-client to install it. The system requirements for Bolt are modest, and it should run on any fairly modern webserver:

• PHP 5.3.2 or higher
• Access to SQLite (which comes bundled with PHP 5.3), or MySQL or PostgreSQL.
• Apache with Mod_rewrite (.htaccess files) or Nginx (virtual host configuration covered below)

Note: Currently we only support Apache and Nginx. Support for Lighttpd will come in the near future, if there’s demand.

There are three ways to install Bolt:

• The easiest way, from the command-line.
• The traditional way, using (S)FTP.
• The nerdy way, for developers.

Use one of the three methods described below to get the Bolt source files, and set them up on your webserver. After you’ve done this, skip to the section for Setting up Bolt.

Option 1: The easy way, using the command-line.

If you have command-line access, you can easily install Bolt by executing a few commands. First, create the folder where you want to install Bolt, if it doesn’t already exist. Enter the folder, and execute the following commands:

curl -O http://bolt.cm/distribution/bolt_latest.tgz
tar -xzf bolt_latest.tgz
chmod -R 777 files/ app/database/ app/cache/ app/config/ theme/

Tip: For easier copy/pasting of the samples, doubleclick the code.

Bolt needs to be able to read and write certain folders like the cache and the template folders. On most servers the webserver runs in a different group than your useraccount, so to give Bolt write access to these files you have to use the chmod statement.

It depends on the exact server configuration if you will need to use 777 or if another setting is better. If you wish to know for sure, ask your hosting provider.

That’s all! After you’ve done this, skip to the section Setting up Bolt. Alternatively, if this didn’t work because your server doesn’t have curl, use wget instead.

Option 2: The traditional way, using (S)FTP.

Download the latest version of Bolt from this location:

http://bolt.cm/distribution/bolt_latest.zip

Extract the .zip file, and upload to your webhost using the (S)FTP client of your choice. After you’ve done this, be sure to chmod the following folders (with containing files) to 777, so they are readable and writable by Bolt:

• app/cache/
• app/config/
• app/database/
• files/
• theme/

Most FTP clients will allow you to do this quickly, using a ‘include files’ or ‘apply to enclosed’ option. It depends on the exact server configuration if you will need to use 777 or if another setting is better. If you wish to know for sure, ask your hosting provider.

Note: Don’t forget to upload the .htaccess file! Bolt won’t work without it. If you can’t find the file on your filesystem, download this default.htaccess file. Upload it to your server, and then rename it to .htaccess.

After you’ve done this, skip to the section Setting up Bolt.

Option 3: The developer way, using git and composer.

If you want to install Bolt using Git and Composer, execute the following commands:

git clone git://github.com/bolt/bolt.git bolt
cd bolt
curl -s http://getcomposer.org/installer | php
php composer.phar install

This will get the Bolt files, the Silex framework, and all required components. Most likely all files and folders will have the correct filerights, but if they don’t, (re)set them using the following command in the bolt/ folder:

chmod -R 777 files/ app/database/ app/cache/ app/config/ theme/

It depends on the exact server configuration if you will need to use 777 or if another setting is better. If you wish to know for sure, ask your hosting provider.

You can easily update your install, by executing the following commands. Whoohoo, living on the edge!!

git pull
cd bolt
php composer.phar self-update
php composer.phar update

Setting up Bolt

By default, Bolt is configured to use an SQLite database. If you want to change this to MySQL or PostgreSQL, see the section below. If not, just leave it as it is.

Open your Bolt site in your browser, and you should be greeted by the screen to set up the first user. If not, see below. If you do see the ‘Create the first user’-screen, do accordingly, and log in to the Bolt Backend. You should now see the (empty) Dashboard screen, and you are able to add some dummy pages using the built-in Loripsum tool. After you’ve done this, you should see some dummy content, and you’re good to go!

If you’re getting unspecified “Internal Server Errors”, the most likely cause is a missing or malfunctioning .htaccess file. See here for tips. If you still encounter errors, check your vhost configuration and be sure that the AllowOverride option is enabled.

Configuring the Database

The (file-based) SQLite database gets stored in the app/ folder. Since it’s a regular file, it’s easy to make backups of your database if you use SQLite.

If you wish to edit the database configuration, you have to change the settings in app/config/config.yml. Apart from SQLite, you can use MySQL and Postgres as database backends. Set the database, username and password:

  database:
    driver: mysql
    username: bolt
    password: password
    databasename: bolt

or:

  database:
    driver: postgres
    username: bolt
    password: password
    databasename: bolt

Support for Postgres is experimental, so use with caution.

Note: The config file is in the YAML format, which means that the indentation is important. Make sure you leave leading spaces intact.

If the hostname or port are something else than ‘localhost:3306’, you can add them like this:

    database:
      username: bolt
      password: bolt%1
      databasename: bolt
      host: database.example.org
      port: 3306

The other settings in the config.yml file can be changed later on, directly from the Bolt backend.

Open your Bolt site in your browser, and you should be greeted by the screen to set up the first user. Do so, and log in to the Bolt Backend. You should now see the (empty) Dashboard screen, and you’ll be able to add some dummy pages, using the built-in Loripsum tool. After you’ve done this, you should see some dummy content, and you’re good to go!

Different configs per environment

When you have multiple environments for the same site, like development/staging/production, you’ll want parts of the config to be the same, and some different per environment. You’ll probably have different database info and debug settings. This can be accomplished by splitting the config.yml file. Put all settings you shared over all environments in the default config.yml, you can commit this in your version control system if wanted. Every setting which is different per environment, or which you do not want in version control (like database info), you put in config_local.yml and this file differs per environment and is NOT added to version control. First config.yml is loaded and then config_local.yml, both files are merged so config_local.yml can override any setting in config.yml. You might disable debug in config.yml and only in development enable debug in config_local.yml.

Apache: Tweaking the .htaccess file

Bolt requires the use of a .htaccess file to make sure requests like page/about-this-website get routed to the index.php, so it can be handled by Bolt. By default, the file looks like this:

# Set the default handler.
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.htm

<FilesMatch "\.(yml)$">
    Order deny,allow
    Deny from all
</FilesMatch>

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine on

  # Some servers require the RewriteBase to be set. If so, set to the correct
  folder.
  # RewriteBase /
  RewriteRule ^thumbs/(.*)?$ ./app/classes/timthumb.php [L]

  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !=/favicon.ico
  RewriteRule ^ ./index.php [L]

</IfModule>

In some cases it won’t work without the RewriteBase line, and in some cases it won’t work with it, depending on how your Apache is configured and the location on your site on the server. Isn’t Apache configuration great?

Anyhow, if your site doesn’t work, try uncommenting the RewriteBase line and set it to the correct folder. For instance, if your Bolt site is located at example.org/test/, set it to RewriteBase /test/.

Alternatively, if your server is running Apache 2.2.16 or higher, you might be able to replace the entire mod_rewrite block from lines 17-20 with this single line:

FallbackResource /index.php

If you have misplaced your .htaccess file, you can get a new one here, from our files distribution page. Be sure to rename it to .htaccess, though.

Nginx: Configuring the virtual host

Nginx is a high-performance web server that is capable of serving thousands of request while using fewer resources than other servers like Apache. However, it does not support .htaccess configuration, which many applications, such as Bolt, require to work properly. Instead, we can configure the virtual server block to handle the rewrites and such that Bolt requires.

Modify the virtual server block below to fit your needs:

# Bolt virtual server
server {
    server_name mycoolsite.com www.mycoolsite.com;
    root /home/mycoolsite.com/public_html;
    index index.php;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
    }

    location ~* /thumbs/(.*)$ {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /app/classes/timthumb.php?$query_string;
    }

    location ~* \.(?:ico|css|js|gif|jpe?g|png|ttf|woff)$ {
        access_log off;
        expires 30d;
        add_header Pragma public;
        add_header Cache-Control "public, mustrevalidate, proxy-revalidate";
    }

    location = /robots.txt { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
    location = /favicon.ico { access_log off; log_not_found off; }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        fastcgi_param HTTPS off;
    }

    location ~ /\.ht {
        deny all;
    }

    location /app {
        deny all;
    }

    location ~ /vendor {
        deny all;
    }

    location ~ \.db$ {
        deny all;
    }
}

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