Are these script installers free?

Yes, and no. It depends on how you want to use them. Both packages have “Free versions” that are either ad-supported or limited in some way. See below for details.

Which script installer should I choose?

You can choose to enable either, or both on your InterWorx servers. You decide based on what makes sense for you and your customers. SimpleScripts is enabled by default.

Why is SimpleScripts enabled by default?

We choose to enable the SimpleScripts plugin by default because we felt that it provided the easiest transition for end users that are used to using ScriptWorx to install scripts.

What are my options if I don’t want myself or my customers to pay anything extra?

Both software packages have free versions, so you don’t have to do anything!

What about my old ScriptWorx installs? Can I import them?

With some scripts, you may be able to import existing script installs into the script installer software packages for management. Check the relevant documentation for details.

How are SimpleScripts and Softaculous different than one another?

As you might expect there are a number of differences. I will cover some of the important differences and similarities here.

• User interface
  Even though both script installer packages provide similar functionality, they have significantly different user interfaces. See each software package’s website for demonstrations.

• Available Scripts
  While there is a lot of overlap in script support, there are some differences as well. See the websites linked above for details.

• Service Design
  SimpleScripts is a “software as a service” solution – when the end user clicks on the SimpleScripts menu item in SiteWorx, they are sent to the simplescripts.com website. Before they get sent there, simplescripts is granted a special FTP user and API access to their SiteWorx account data, and SimpleScripts uses these tools to perform the script installation. Information about what scripts are installed where is maintained on the SimpleScripts servers. No SimpleScripts software is actually installed on the InterWorx server. The SimpleScripts software is updated on the SimpleScripts servers.

  The Softaculous software is actually installed and run on each InterWorx server. It gets installed automatically the first time the plugin is enabled. The softaculous software itself is installed under /usr/local/softaculous, and the software packages softaculous can install get placed in /var/softaculous. Softaculous also makes use of the InterWorx API to assist the user with the installs. Softaculous will install a cron job periodically check for new script updates.

• Software Administration
  With SimpleScripts, you can customize your customer’s interaction with the software by creating your own SimpleScripts “web host account.” This is not required, but it does allow you extra flexibility in managing SimpleScripts on your servers. Resellers also can have the option of using their own SimpleScripts web host account as well. SimpleScripts provides a “host key” and a “host API key”, both of which can be entered in The SimpleScripts portion of NodeWorx.

  Softaculous has an administration interface built in that is accessible via NodeWorx, that allows you to configure various options.

This is the first release of the 4.x series that will be automatically applied to all current InterWorx servers, versions 3 and higher. All InterWorx servers that have auto-updates enabled can and should receive this update.

This will be an incremental release for servers already running version 4.0.0. For servers running version 3.0, this upgrade will be significant. From version 3 to 4, virtually every aspect of the software has been improved, inside and out.

Special notes for the version 3 to version 4 upgrade

Given the magnitude of this upgrade from version 3 to version 4, there are a few things you should be on the lookout for:

1) Problems accessing InterWorx immediately following the upgrade
IF you or your customers experience any problem logging in or accessing interworx after the upgrade, the first thing to try to fix it is to login as root, and restart interworx with the command

service iworx restart
service httpd restart

If problems persist after that, please open a support ticket.

2) Problems accessing webmail immediately following the upgrade
IF there are any problems accessing webmail, try the following things first:

service iworx restart
service httpd restart
~iworx/cron/iworx.pex --fively

If problems persist after that, please open a support ticket.

3) Problems running PHP scripts on client websites
We do not expect there to be significant problems with PHP scripts, but interworx version 4 does provide suphp as an optional server-wide option. In order to provide this feature, the upgrade script will have to make modifications to the clients’ apache virtualhost config files. If these files have been heavily customized, manual intervention may be required.

If needed, backups of the original virtualhost config files will be in /etc/httpd/conf.d/conf_backup/ after the upgrade.

If there are any website problems, first just try restarting the webserver and see if that helps.

As always, any other problems with or questions about this update can be sent via e-mail to support@zzservers.com, or by opening a support ticket via the web at https://www.zzservers.com/support

• Apache 2 – Linux Web server
• MySQL 5 – MySQL Database Server
• PHP4/5 – PHP Scripting Language
• phpMyAdmin – Web-based database admin software.

Note: Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP/Perl together commonly known as LAMP Server.

First, let us prepare a system that has a minimum requirement of Debian/Ubuntu version of Linux with at least 256MB of RAM available. Anything less than this minimum ram will cause lot of problems since we are running a server along especially MySQL and Webmin requires lots of RAM to run properly. MySQL will give you this nasty error “cannot connect to mysql.sock” if you don’t have enough memory in your server.

I love Debian/Ubuntu based Linux because of my enormous affinity towards this command apt-get. As a starter knowing this one command, It is so easy to install packages and you don’t need to worry about package dependency and configuration. You need to buy a dedicated server or a VPS package if you want to setup your own server. If you want to experiment with the server and installation it is recommended to buy a VPS package. Believe it or not it is so easy to install and configure your server yourself even though you are new are to Linux and dedicated/VPS hosting.

First download PuTTy if you are accessing your server through SSH. Just enter the IP of your server with root login to access your host. As you probably know, Webmin is a freely available server control panel and we will setup this once we have completed the LAMP server and Mail Server. Webmin makes more easier for us to fine tune our Linux box.

Before proceeding to install, update the necessary packages with Debian with this command.

apt-get install update

1. Installing Apache + PHP

Apache is one of the most famous web server which runs on most Linux based servers. With just few commands you can configure apache to run with PHP 4 or PHP 5.

If you want to install PHP 4, just apt-get

apt-get install apache2 php4 libapache2-mod-php4

To install PHP5, just run the following on Linux shell. Note that if you don’t specify packages with ’4′, PHP5 will be automatically installed.

apt-get install apache2 php5 libapache2-mod-php5

Apache configuration file is located at: /etc/apache2/apache2.conf and your web folder is /var/www.

To check whether php is installed and running properly, just create a test.php in your /var/www folder with phpinfo() function exactly as shown below.

vi /var/www/test.php

# test.php
<?php phpinfo(); ?>

Point your browser to http://ip.address/test.php or http://domain/test.php and this should show all your php configuration and default settings.

You can edit necessary values or setup virtual domains using apache configuration file.

2. Installing MySQL Database Server

Installing mysql database server is always necessary if you are running a database driven e-commerce site. Remember running MySQL server to a fair extend requires at least 256mb of RAM in your server. So unless you are running database driven sites you don’t absolutely need MySQL. The following commands will install MySQL 5 server and MySQL 5 client.

apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client php5-mysql

Note: If you have already installed php4, you should make a slight change like this.

apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client php4-mysql

The configuration file of MySQL is located at: /etc/mysql/my.cnf

Creating users to use MySQL and Changing Root Password

By default mysql creates user as root and runs with no passport. You might need to change the root password.

To change Root Password

mysql -u root

mysql> USE mysql;

mysql> UPDATE user SET Password=PASSWORD(‘new-password’) WHERE user=’root’;

mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

You must never use root password, so you might need to create a user to connect to MySQL database for a PHP script. Alternatively you can add users to MySQL database by using a control panel like Webmin or phpMyAdmin to easily create or assign database permission to users. We will install Webmin and phpMyAdmin during later once we complete basic installation.

3. PhpMyAdmin Installation

PhpMyAdmin is a nice web based database management and administration software and easy to install and configure under apache. Managing databases with tables couldn’t be much simpler by using phpMyAdmin.

All you need to do is:

apt-get install phpmyadmin

The phpMyAdmin configuration file is located at: /etc/phpmyadmin folder.

To set up under Apache all you need to do is include the following line in /etc/apache2/apache2.conf:

Include /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf

Now restart Apache:

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Point your browser to: http://domain/phpmyadmin

That’s it! MySQL and phpMyAdmin are ready. Log in with your mysql root password and create users to connect to database from your php script.

This tutorial was written by Scott who currently runs MySQL-Apache-PHP.com.