Coppermine Tutorial and Installation How To

This web hosting tutorial describes how to use the Coppermine photo gallery software with your NEXCESS.NET web hosting account. NEXCESS.NET specializes in hosting Coppermine galleries and this tutorial is meant to help you quickly setup your Coppermine with our web hosting service.

Coppermine is free software. You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

For the sake of this tutorial we'll assume that you own the domain 'johnsmith.com' and are setting up Coppermine at http://johnsmith.com/coppermine/.

Follow these steps to complete the tutorial:

1. The first thing to do is to run through the SiteWorx MySQL tutorial and create a database for Coppermine to use to store the information it needs.

   Create a database called 'coppermine' with a user named 'coppermine'. When you do this SiteWorx will prefix the database and user names with some text resembling your domain name.

   With our example domain of 'johnsmith.com' the database name is 'johnsmit_coppermine' and the username is the same 'johnsmit_coppermine'.
2. Download the latest version of Coppermine from the Coppermine website and unzip the contents of the zip file to your desktop using http://winzip.com.

   You should now have a folder containing all the files and folders necessary to install and run coppermine. Rename the 'cpg1.3.0beta4' folder to 'coppermine'. Upload the 'coppermine' folder to your web hosting account. You should do this using an FTP Program. If you need help with FTPing files, you can check out the FTP tutorials on our tutorials page.

   Once the Coppermine files and folders have finished uploading to your web hosting account, you need to change the permissions on three of the folders. You can do this with the CHMOD command in your FTP program. If you need help with this, check out the FTP tutorials on our tutorials page. CHMOD the folders according to the following:

   • CHMOD the 'albums' folder to 777
   • CHMOD the 'include' folder to 777
   • CHMOD the 'albums/userpics' folder to 777
3. Now we're going to access the 'install.php' file so we can run the installation wizard. In this example, we'll point to 'http://www.johnsmith.com/coppermine/install.php'. If you receive any errors, check to make sure you set the correct permissions on the folders. You should be at this screen now:

   

   The top section is for creating the admin account that you will use to manage your gallery. Enter in a login and password. In the next section, enter in the information for the database you created in step #1. In this example, we'll enter the following information:

   • MySQL Host: 'localhost' - Stays the same.
   • MySQL Database Name: 'johnsmit_coppermine'
   • MySQL Username: 'johnsmit_coppermine'
   • MySQL Password: 'mypassword'
   • MySQL Table Prefix: 'cpg130_' - Stays the same.
   The next section asks for the location of the ImageMagik program on your server. We'll be using GD Library for creating the thumbnails, so you can leave this field blank and click the 'Let's Go' button to continue with the installation.
4. Coppermine should now tell you that your installation is complete. It should also tell you that it detected GD Library version 1 and GD Library version 2 and that it selected version 2 to use for your gallery. Your screen should look like this:

   

   Click the 'Login' link to continue to the next page. Enter the information for the Coppermine admin account you created. Your screen should look like this:

   

   Click the 'Login' button to login to the admin control panel and start managing your Coppermine Gallery. The Coppermine web hosting tutorial is now complete.

   For more information on how to use Coppermine once it's installed, check out the Coppermine Manual.

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