TWiki System Requirements

Server and client requirements for TWiki 01-Dec-2001

Low client and server requirements are core features that keep TWiki widely deployable, particularly across a range of browser platforms and versions.

Server Requirements

TWiki is written in Perl 5, uses a number of shell commands, and requires RCS (Revision Control System), a GNU Free Software package. TWiki is developed in a basic Linux/Apache environment. It also works with Microsoft Windows, and should have no problem on any other platform that meets the requirements.

Required Server Environment
Resource	Unix	Windows*
Perl	5.005_03 or higher
Non-standard Perl modules	Net::SMTP (or sendmail)	Net::SMTP, MIME::Base64, Digest::SHA1
RCS	5.7 or higher
Other external programs	ls, fgrep, egrep
Web server	Apache; others (with CGI support, authentication, extended path)

* Current documentation covers Linux/Apache only. See TWiki:Codev/TWikiOnWindows for work-to-date on a Windows installation guide.

Client Requirements

The TWiki standard installation has extremely low browser requirements:

• HTML 3.2 compliant
• generates XHTML 1.0 pages that are compatible with HTML 3.2
• minimal use of JavaScript in the user interface (degrades gracefully)
• no cookies
• no CSS

You can easily add functionality, by customizing TWikiTemplates, for one, while tailoring the browser requirements to your situation.

Known Issues

• The new TWikiPlugins feature currently does not have compatibility guidelines for developers. Plugins can require just about anything - browser-specific functions, stylesheets (CSS), Java applets, cookies, specific Perl modules,... - check the individual Plugin specs.
  • Plugins included in the TWiki distribution do not add requirements.

-- MikeMannix^? - 12 Jan 2002