Something Neos Part I - Installation on a hosted server

By: Florian Weiss

Adventures of a shell newb

The following article will have a very prosaic approach - if you are just interested in the details and possible error sources, just skip to the "Conclusion" part.

Introduction

Much is going on in the world of typo3 - and being a long time user of typo3 3.X and 4.X (most of my projects went through different stages up to 4.5.X LTS) I did not concern myself too much with the difference between 6.X and Neos so far.

To be honest I still don't know the exact difference in detail, but the expectation of a system that is built on a solid application framework using the MVC (Model View Controller) pattern intrigued me to try it out.
That said the system is still in alpha (4 at the time I write those lines) - so please bear in mind that my experiences will most certainly not reflect the experience a user has when he/she sets up the final version of Neos.

My goal is to use Neos as CMS for my personal homepage, which should not only host my small companies information (I'm employed, but do undertake small side projects from time to time) but also lessons and articles for my students (I'm part time teacher).
Being a fan of the "let's get this thing running and try it out" approach when using non-productive environments (which I'm working with so far) I fired up my shell (Putty) to connect to my host.
I'm not much of a sysadmin myself (one has to admit that you can't be able know everything in IT) and actually more of a windows guy, (*ducks from the virtual stones thrown*) so the best idea I had was to follow the installation instructions word by word...

Something putty this way comes

First of all you will have a much better time installing Neos if you have your own server at the moment (it would be even cooler if you know what you're doing - which I do not sometimes), but let's be honest. In the CMS world there are (imho) many people like me who want to a) have the benefit of a hosted server where everything is neatly set up and secure, while not concerning themselves with server security apart from the latest updates for CMS and extensions b) still have some special plugins/extensions installed and certain user rights for the shell.

As Danko Jones already said: "This is a sticky situation" - especially for a hoster as far as I can tell, as you need to give the people certain privileges, while not giving them the ability to damage the environment. (but we'll read about that later.
Hopefully there will be a list of hosters that support Neos at a near time in the future, but from what I have heard from more experienced people the system still needs more testing before this can be done.

At http://neos.typo3.org/download.html you'll find the installation instructions, which are rather short and look quite easy.

curl -s https://getcomposer.org/installer | php  

Enter! ... curl is not available... Email to my hoster that I need curl - a day later I'm able to continue.
Ok so now this should work out, curl command - Enter! ... Some settings on your machine make Composer unable to work properly - The suhosin.executor.include.whitelist setting is incorrect.

At this point I do what every good mannered and sensible person should do: Get out that irc client and go to chat.freenode.net #typo3-neos.
What can I say - the Typo3 community never fails to amaze me.
I've been to a lot of channels and visited a lot of communities in my time - but I need to point out that the Typo3 community is (in my personal opinion) the best and most friendly I've ever had the privilege to be part of.
Like with my first steps with typo3 3.X - you don't get looked down upon, no matter how stupid your question seems when you later get more information about it and this sort of warm welcome creates a nice feeling and you feel responsibility to give that back when you have more experience and another newb comes your way to treat him/her in the same friendly manner that you experienced yourself.

Enough of the back padding - you want to know how I did continue, which brings <cedricziel> on the stage. He informed me, that you can temporarily whitelist phar via an optional parameter:

curl -s https://getcomposer.org/installer | php -d suhosin.executor.include.whitelist=phar

now we are talking - phar gets installed and can be used now.
So I changed to my /htdocs directory and ran the next command:

php /path/to/composer.phar create-project --dev --stability alpha typo3/neos-base-distribution TYPO3-Neos-1.0-alpha4

which again failed to work due to a whitelist issue. Long story short, I did email my hoster again to whitelist phar - which they did, but if you can't get your hoster to do that for you another possible approach would be to temporarily whitelist it again:

php -d suhosin.executor.include.whitelist=phar /path/to/composer.phar create-project --dev --stability alpha typo3/neos-base-distribution TYPO3-Neos-1.0-alpha4

If somehow possible let phar be whitelisted though - you'll be better off in the long run.

So what's left to do is setting up the virtual host inside apache.conf and adding the entry to /etc/hosts.
As you may have guessed... my hoster does not allow me to do those things.
I tried just redirecting the domain in my GUI Tool to the Web directory of the install - but this obviously isn't enough.

I hope you rejoin next time, when I'll hopefully talk about my successful installation.

Conclusion of Part I

• Own server much easier to install than hosted server because of privileges and rights issues
• curl has to be installed
  • only solution I found was asking my hoster to do so
• composer will not work correctly if it is not whitelisted - either:
  
  • ask your hoster to put it on the whitelist for you
  • try running php with: "php -d suhosin.executor.include.whitelist=phar" instead of just "php"
• not being able to setup virtual hosts will be a showstopper