This chapter is about the installation of ibWebAdmin only. Information about setting up apache/php/firebird/interbase is omitted because there are countless books and online resources available which are covering these topics in depths. Bringing firebird/interbase support into php is the same procedure like with any other php extension. If you have problems with php, reading the installation chapter of the php manual will be a good start.
To install ibWebAdmin on your webserver get the latest release package from sourceforge. Copy the package to a location below of your webservers document root. (/var/www/htdocs in the fillowing example) Finally unpack the package using either tar or zip.
For example, if you have chosen the tar package the steps to go are
> cp ibWebAdmin_X.X.tar.gz /var/www/htdocs > cd /var/www/htdocs > tar xfz ibWebAdmin_X.X.tar.gz
This will create a directory named ibWebAdmin_X.X and you will be able to access the scripts with the URI http://yourhostname/ibWebAdmin_X.X/index.html .
Warning: All the following configuration steps will open potential (but still unknown) security holes on a public accessable webserver. None of this steps is necessary if you only want to browse and edit data. But some features will fail if this steps are not done.
Make sure that the binary tools (isql, gbak, gsec and friends) delivered with you database distribution are executable by the webserver via php's exec() function. The easiest (not best) way to do so is to make the tools world executable. The names for the tools are slightly different for windows/linux, firebird/interbase.
> cd /usr/local/firebird/bin > for executable in isql gbak gfix gsec gstat do chmod a+x $executable done >
If you are running php in the safe mode you have to take care that your php configuration did not disables the execution of these binaries. Check the php settings for safe_mode_exec_dir and disable_functions for this.
The apache needs read permissions for the directories holding your database files if you are using the $ALLOWED_DIRS configuration setting.
To display database statistics the apache needs read permissions for the database file.