Quickstart
For Rangitaki Version 1.5.0
This guide shows you how to setup Rangitaki and it teaches you the basics. After this guide you're ready to use Rangitaki as your blogging engine. Since this is a quick starting guide I won't explain every single option. Please read the full documentation for further information.
To fully customize your Rangitaki installation read also the localization guide and the theming guide.
For more professional blogging (like online blog post creation and editing and API) read the Rangitaki Control Center (RCC) documentation.
1. Requirements
Software
Rangitaki needs just a Web Server like the Apache HTTP Server or nginx and a PHP installation. You don't need a MySQL (or any other database) installation.
To test if you're server has a PHP installation, create a file name info.phpand copy the follwing code into it, upload the file to your web directory and access it through a browser.
<?php phpinfo(); ?>If you're seeing an page containing this code you have no PHP installation on your server. Otherwise you have one and you can get many information about this from this page.
Furthermore you may need a good text editor for writing blog posts. Either on your private computer, if you configure your Rangitaki installation at home, or on your server or just use the RCC.
Skills
You must know how to upload files and directories to your server and how to use text editor (e.g. vim, Emacs, nano, gEdit or Kate). That's it.
2. Download
1. Download
Download the latest version of Rangitaki from the GitLab Releases.
You can also clone the GitLab repo and use the stable branch (git checkout stable);
2. Extract
Linux
If you got a .tar.gz file:
Fire up a terminal, switch to the folder containing the download and run this:
tar -xvzf rangitaki.tar.gzIf you got a .zip file:
Fire up a terminal, switch to the folder containing the download and run this:
unzip rangitaki.zipMac
Just double click the archive.
Windows
If you got a .zip file:
Just right click that archive and click extract.
If you got a .tar.gz file:
Download and install 7-zip.
Right click the archive. 7-Zip -> Extract here
3. Setup
The setup of Rangitaki is as easy as downloading it.
Again, I will only explain a few options here. For more, read the full documentation.
1. Configuration
Go to the root directory of your Rangitaki installation and run
php bin/init.phpand follow the guide.
If you want to update your configuration just run the script again. It will present you the current values and let you set new ones where you enter one and keep the old one if you just hit enter.
2. Files and Directories
Here a few words about some files and directories in Rangitaki. All directories and files are covered in the full documentation
/articles
This is the directory where the blog post for the different blogs are stored.There are already a few example directories, which you can delete if you don't need them.
/articles/blog (e.g. /articles/main)
The directory where the articles for that blog are stored. You have at least one directory name 'main' where the markdown files for your main blog are stored.
There are already a few example blog posts. You can look at them to learn how Rangitaki blog posts are written or you can simply delete them.
/blogs
The files for your different blogs are stored here. You can have a look at them to learn how to create a new subblog or simply delete them, but DON'T DELETE THE main.md FILE!
/media
This is a directory where you can store your used assets. You don't have to store them but it is recommended since it keeps the whole system organized.
When you are including a image, video, whatever in your Markdown blog post you have to use a relative path based from the Rangitaki blog main directory, not from the directory of your Markdown file
You can safely delete the example file.
4. Writing blog posts
Writing blog posts in Rangitaki is quite simple. The text is written in Markdown and important information about blog posts are written with special tags.
1. Tags
In Rangitaki 1.0 there are four tags you can use. You don't have to use any tags.
Tags have to following structure:
%TAGNAME: Some text
%TITLE
Set here the title of your blog post.
%DATE
Set here the date of your blog post. You don't have to care about some format. Just set it like you want
%AUTHOR
Set here the name of the author of the blog post.
%TAGS
Set here some tags, that describe the blog post.
There separated through a , (mind the space).
2. Markdown
Writing the text itself is also very simple. The blogging engine supports Markdown and also GitHub flavored markdown.
But you can also just write a blog post and don't care about formatting.
5. Publishing
You are now done with the setup of the blog and you also wrote a first blog post. If you did this stuff directly on your server, visit this page with a web browser and you see your Rangitaki blog.
If you did this on your private machine, then upload the content of the Rangitaki directory to your server.
You're done now! You're Rangitaki blog is running.
For more information, read the full documentation and the other documentations.