Installing Bumblebee

Pre-requisites

For this installation, it is assumed that you have a working installation of MySQL, Apache httpd, and PHP. Bumblebee has been tested with MySQL 4.0.24, Apache 1.3.33, Apache 2.x and PHP 4.3.10; Please note that the 1.0 series of Bumblebee will not work with PHP5 because the behaviour of the assignment operator has changed drastically between PHP4 and PHP5.

Installation

1. Unpack the downloaded archive into your web space.
2. Go to install/install.php using your browser
3. Fill in the appropriate values (database prefix, database username and password etc) and check get the installer script to check that your installation looks like it is in good shape (it will automatically check to see if you have required libraries, optional libraries, that your username is permitted and that the passwords are sufficiently strong).
   
   
4. If your database administrator has already setup a MySQL user for Bumblebee and created the database then you should deselect the option to include commands to create these.
5. You can then choose to either configure the database manually or automatically using the installer script. In either case, you will need the username and password of a MySQL user that is sufficiently privileged to perform the setup operations. At a minimum, you will need permission to DROP TABLE, CREATE TABLE and INSERT on the specified database; if you have requested that the installer try to create the Bumblebee user and the database, you will also need permission to DROP DATABASE, CREATE DATABASE, GRANT, FLUSH and INSERT into the mysql database. The root user always has these privileges; you could also create a user with the necessary permissions yourself.

   manual database setup

   Download and save the generated bumblebee.sql file then either load it into the database using either phpMyAdmin (click on the "SQL" link) or load it using the mysql command line tools: (mysql -p --user username < bumbelebee.sql)

   automatic database setup

   You will need to provide the username and password of a MySQL user with sufficient privileges to perform the setup.

   and save the db.ini and .sql files.
6. Save db.ini into your Bumblebee installation on the webserver as config/db.ini.
7. Edit config/bumblebee.ini to your taste (configuring Bumblebee).
8. Log in as the admin user created in step 2 to test it all out.
9. Customise the templates in theme/ if you want.
10. Create additional users, groups, projects and instruments as you require.
11. Send an email to the Bumblebee developers to let them know how fantastic Bumblebee is... (or at least to let them know that it's worked out for you and they can inform you of major updates to Bumblebee)

PHP requirements

Permission for PHP to undertake the following operations is required for full functionality. Note that Bumblebee will work quite happily with the default setup of PHP, but for the case of sites where the default configuration is not used... If you find any other gotchas, then please let us know.

PHP function	Required for	Impact	Fix
mysql_*()	mysql_pconnect used for connection to the MySQL database to do anything	not functional	include extension=mysql.so in your php.ini file and ensure that the mysql libraries are installed for PHP.
system()	There is one system call to execute mysqldump	"Backup database" won't work	if PHP safe_mode is on, the location of mysqldump must be in safe_mode_exec_dir specified in php.ini
mail()	(optional) email notifications of bookings and sending PDF reports	Sending emails will fail	Specify the correct smtp or sendmail settings in the [mail function] section of php.ini

Optional components

RADIUS authentication

The PEAR modules PEAR::Auth and PEAR::Auth::Radius as well as the PECL RADIUS module (see library paths) are required.

LDAP authentication

The PEAR module PEAR::Auth (which includes the LDAP container) is required (see library paths). Additionally, PHP must be compiled with LDAP support and OpenLDAP should be installed on your server; this is the case for most distributions, but search in the output from phpinfo() for the compilation options and LDAP configuration. (NOTE: LDAP authentication was added to Bumblebee from version 1.0.1.)

PDF export

This requires the public domain FPDF library. Install it somewhere in your PHP include path so that it is accessible to PHP with require 'fpdf/fpdf.php'. (see library paths)

Note for users of developer snapshots: the PEAR modules for RADIUS, LDAP and PHP4/5 compatability along with the FPDF library and a customised version of the PHP-gettext translation library are included in the download. If you want to use RADIUS authentication, then you still need the PECL RADIUS module

Library paths

Bumblebee looks for PHP libraries on the standard include path, plus the path specified in the bumblebee.ini configuration file (ExtraIncludePath: configuring Bumblebee).