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System requirements : Get started

Minimum system requirements to install and use Elxis CMS. Get started

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System requirements

Minimum system requirements to install and use Elxis CMS.

Elxis can be used in a wide range of platforms and operating systems. This document lists the minimum system requirements needed in order for Elxis to function properly. If you have a question or this document does not cover all the issues regarding Elxis system requirements please visit the Elxis forums for support.

Operating system

Elxis is platform independent meaning that it can run on any operating system as long as there is a web server installed that meets the minimum requirements for PHP and database below. The most common operating systems Elxis can run are Linux/Unix, Macintosh and Microsoft Windows. We strongly recommend Linux as the server operating system. Any Linux distribution is fine (Red Hat, Suse, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, etc).

Disk space

A fresh Elxis installation takes about 15MB space on disk. Cached files, logs, backups, user uploaded images and additional third party extensions installed on site will take much more space. The disk space should not fall below 100MB for a small site. While the site grows more space will be needed especially if you upload many media files (images and video). Our recommendation for a small-to-mid site is 300MB.

Web Server

Elxis can run on any PHP enabled web server like Apache, Nginx, Lighttpd and IIS. We recommend the usage of the Apache web server. Mod Rewrite is required by Apache if you wish to enable SEO PRO (strongly recommended) in order to have cleaner URLs. For Nginx you should use the HTTP rewrite module, for IIS the Ionic Isapi Rewrite filter and for Lighttpd you can have SEO PRO URLs with the help of the Lua scripting language. Consider your web server documentation for more information on alternatives to Apache's mod rewrite.

PHP

Elxis requires PHP 5.2 or later. PHP 5.4+ is recommended. We have already taken under consideration the future PHP 6.x. When PHP 6.x stable becomes available we will release an updated version with full PHP 6.x support. Elxis does not require any special PHP library to be enabled on the web server. It runs perfectly on the default PHP installation (we consider PDO library for database and GD for images as built-in). If you run PHP under safe_mode then Elxis will face problems handling files. As the safe_mode directive is going to be removed from PHP in version 6.0 we strongly recommend you to disable safe mode. If you use Open Basedir protection and you have set the Elxis repository folder to an in-accessible from the web path then make sure the Elxis repository is within the allowed paths.

Database

Elxis CMS uses the PHP's built-in PDO library to handle database. Elxis can connect to many different database types of those PDO supports like MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Firebird, Oracle, OCI, ODBC and MsSQL. Well supported databases are MySQL and PostgreSQL, with the MySQL (with InnoDB storage engine) being highly recomended for usage in Elxis CMS. If you use PostgreSQL you might face problems with some third party extensions which are usally tested under MySQL only.

Browser

Elxis will render perfectly on any modern web browser with javascript enabled, HTML5 and CSS3 support. Older browsers will not parse CSS3 styling rules although this is not a problem browsing an Elxis powered web site. While Elxis' front-end section can be accessed from any device (desktop PCs, smartphones, tablets, web TVs, etc) the administration section requires login from a desktop computer with a large monitor (1024x768 minimum screen resolution, 1200+ is reccommended). For the administration section we reccomend the usage of Firefox web browser.

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