Manual Installation

Currently as ChurchCRM is still in development an install script is not yet available. ChurchCRM can run on a LAMP server (Linux, Apache, Mysql, PHP) or a Shared Hosting account through a manual installation.

How Do I Install ChurchInfo?

  1. The .tar.gz file download contains a directory called "churchinfo" Extract the file and place the contents into a directory in the document root of your Web server or via FTP to a shared hosting account

  2. Within the directory you'll find a directory called "SQL" containing a file named "Install.sql". Contained in this file are the SQL statements necessary to create the ChurchInfo database.

  3. For LAMP servers, log onto your database server under the root account (or other account allowed to create databases), create a database for ChurchCRM, and then run the contents of Install.sql to create the tables and initial data.

For example:

mysqladmin -u [user] -p create [database-name] mysql -u [user] -p [database-name] < Install.sql

  • For shared hosting accounts you must create a database within your hosting control panel, and import the Install.sql script $

3) Within the folder, you'll find a directory called "Include" containing a file named "Config.php". The first statements in this file are the database connection parameters:

For example:

$sSERVERNAME = "localhost";

$sUSER = "root";

$sPASSWORD = "password";

$sDATABASE = "churchinfo";

Change these parameters to match the mysql server and user account you intend to use. You MUST set the $sRootPath option properly as described in Config.php. It is NOT recommended that you use the ROOT account for accessing your database.

4) You should be able to access ChurchCRM at "http://[server name]/churchinfo". The database script will have set up an initial user called "Admin" with a password of "churchinfoadmin" (passwords are case insensitive). You will be prompted to change this password upon login. Once you have created other user accounts, you may delete or rename this default account. Just make sure that you always have a user with administrative privledges.

5.) Select Admin->Edit General Settings and Admin->Edit Report Settings to finish customizing your installation.

  • You may need to change the default TrueType font path for the included JPGraph library used for the daily donation report. To do this, you must edit line 38 of the file Include/jpgraph-1.13/src/jpgraph.php. If you have JPGraph and FPDF elsewhere on your server, you can specify where in the general settings page.

Security Considerations:

  • If you are using the database backup utility, you need to make sure that the churchinfo/SQL directory is not accessible to your users! Otherwise, with the right timing, anybody can download the temporary files used in creating database backups and thus read the entire contents of the database! Different web servers have different means of access control. In Apache, for example, you might add a section something like this to your httpd.conf:

Order deny,allow Deny from all

Please see your web server's documentation if you need further help.