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TWiki System Requirements

Server and client requirements for TWiki 01-Sep-2004

Low client and server requirements are core features that keep TWiki widely deployable, particularly across a range of browser platforms and versions.

Server Requirements

TWiki is written in Perl 5, uses a number of shell commands, and requires RCS (Revision Control System), a GNU Free Software package. TWiki is developed in a basic Linux/Apache environment. It also works with Microsoft Windows, and should have no problem on any other platform that meets the requirements.

Resource	Required Server Environment *
Perl	5.005_03 or higher (5.6.1 recommended, 5.8.x does work in most cases, but see TWiki:Codev.IssuesWithPerl5dot8)
Non-standard Perl modules	• Unix: Net::SMTP (or sendmail) • Windows: Net::SMTP, MIME::Base64, Digest::SHA1 • Internationalisation: Unicode::MapUTF8   (only for non-ISO-8859-1 sites using TWiki:Codev.EncodeURLsWithUTF8 with Perl 5.6 or lower)
RCS	5.7 or higher (including GNU diff) Optional, but the all-Perl RCS replacement is not currently recommended for live sites - see TWiki:Codev.RcsLite
GNU diff	GNU diff 2.7 or higher is required when not using the all-Perl RcsLite. Install on PATH if not included with RCS (check version with diff -v) Must be the version used by RCS, to avoid problems with binary attachments - RCS may have hard-coded path to diff
Other external programs	fgrep, egrep
Cron/scheduler	• Unix: cron • Windows: cron equivalents
Web server	Apache 1.3 is well supported; Apache 2.0 is not recommended yet (see TWiki:Codev.IssuesWithApache2dot0). For other servers, CGI support, authentication, extended path info required; also, the register script is likely to need significant changes

* Current documentation mainly covers Linux and Apache installations. See WindowsInstallCookbook for a Windows installation guide. See TWiki:Codev.TWikiOn for help with installation on various platforms including Unix, MacOS X, Apache mod_perl, web hosts, etc.

Client Requirements

The TWiki standard installation has extremely low browser requirements:

• HTML 3.2 compliant
• generates XHTML 1.0 pages that are compatible with HTML 3.2
• minimal use of JavaScript in the user interface (degrades gracefully)
• no cookies
• no CSS (if the ClassicSkin is used)

You can easily add functionality, by customizing TWikiTemplates, for one, while tailoring the browser requirements to your situation.

Known Issues

• The TWikiPlugins feature currently does not have compatibility guidelines for developers. Plugins can require just about anything - browser-specific functions, stylesheets (CSS), Java applets, cookies, specific Perl modules,... - check the individual Plugin specs.
  • Plugins included in the TWiki distribution do not add requirements.

-- TWiki:Main.MikeMannix - 12 Jan 2002
-- TWiki:Main.PeterThoeny - 15 Aug 2004