Installing Opendocman – Problems and Solutions

Opendocman looks like a nifty open source document management system (DMS) from what little I've seen of it.  Too bad it suffers from scant documentation, and even scantier installation help (from the forums or online)!  I'll try to list some of the pitfalls I encountered, and how to solve them.

1. Uploading to your hosting server and expanding the tar.gz file should be straightforward.
2. After expanding, manually create a MySQL database because the setup.php file in Opendocman requires Grant privileges remotely, something which administrators may not allow.
3. Create a data folder in a private folder not open to browsing from the Internet (called the "root" in the installation README) — typically, this may be called "tmp"/"private"/"var".  This is for storing documents uploaded to the repository without allowing unauthenticated users to browse to the documents.
4. Change the config.php file to reflect your database settings.
5. Once installed, login with "admin"/no password, and change your admin settings at "Admin > User".
6. You're good to go!

The two main problems I faced were the creation of a database using setup.php (doesn't work well), and creation of the data folder for storing the repository (needs an absolute path – get it from your server administrator if you do not have it and encounter dataDir problems during installation).